Jenny Uglow

Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE FRSL (née Crowther,^[1][2] born 1947) is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.

She won the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2003 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 1730–1810, and her works have twice been shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She is a past president of the Alliance of Literary Societies and has also chaired the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.

Uglow was brought up in Cumbria and later Dorset.^[3] She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1958–64) and St Anne's College, University of Oxford.^[4][5] After gaining a first in English, she took a BLitt.^[3] In 1971, she married Steve Uglow, professor emeritus at the University of Kent; the couple have two sons and two daughters. As of 2015, Uglow lives at Canterbury in Kent.^[2][6]

Uglow has worked in publishing since leaving university. Until 2013 she was editorial director of the publishing company Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House.^[3][6]

She is an honorary visiting professor at the University of Warwick,^[7] vice-president of the Gaskell Society^[8] and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust.^[9] She was formerly a member of the British Library's Advisory Group for the Humanities.^[3]

Uglow compiled an encyclopaedia of biographies of prominent women, first published in 1982; the work is currently in its fourth edition and contains more than 2,000 biographies,^[10][11] though later versions have involved other editors. Uglow later wrote:

I embarked on the Macmillan Biographical Dictionary of Women in a fit of pique because all reference books were full of men: it was a mad undertaking, born of a time when feminists wanted heroines and didn't have Google.^[12]

Her first full-length biographies, depicting the Victorian women writers George Eliot (1987) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1993), continue her interest in documenting women and reflect her literary background. Gaskell scholar Angus Easson describes Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories as "the best current biography" of the author, and The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell refers to it as "authoritative".^[13][14]

Subsequent works have moved further into the past, with subjects including 18th century author Henry Fielding (1995), and artists William Hogarth (1997) and Thomas Bewick (2006). The scientists and engineers of the Lunar Society, including Erasmus Darwin, Matthew Boulton, James Watt, Joseph Priestley and Josiah Wedgwood, are the subject of her prize-winning work The Lunar Men (2003).^[15]

Uglow's biographies have been particularly praised for their vivid, detailed recreation of the time and place in which their subjects lived. "No one gives us the feel of past life as she does" writes A. S. Byatt of Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick,^[16] and a review of The Lunar Men in The Observer claims "never has the eighteenth century come so much to life."^[17] Reviewing Hogarth: A Life and a World, Peter Ackroyd wrote, "She depicts the city at first hand, almost as if she herself had been wandering through Hogarth's engravings."^[18] Frances Spalding considers Nature's Engraver to be "immeasurably enriched by Uglow's canny grasp of period detail."^[19] David Chandler, however, complains that "Uglow tends to amass detail on quotable detail, when sometimes one would like a little more taut synthesis, more interrogation of those details."^[20]

Uglow's depiction of scientific thought has also been praised; A. S. Byatt, for example, describes The Lunar Men as "full of [...] the real sense that scientific curiosity is as exciting as any 'artistic' pursuit."^[21] Her discussion of art has gained a more mixed reception. The New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman complains that Uglow overvalues Hogarth's paintings and neglects his artistic associates in favour of his literary ones.^[22] On the other hand, Helen Macdonald, reviewing Nature's Engraver, considers that it is "in her descriptions of the physical process of artistic creation, and her musings on individual engravings, that Uglow is at her most energetic and fluid."^[23]

Uglow's non-biographical writing includes a history of gardening in Britain, written for the bicentenary of the Royal Horticultural Society in 2004, which Uglow describes as a "labour of love".^[3][6] She is also a reviewer for The Times Literary Supplement, The Sunday Times, The Guardian, The New York Review of Books and The Independent on Sunday.^[3][24]

Uglow has edited collections of writings by Walter Pater (1973) and Angela Carter (1997), as well as co-editing a set of essays about Charles Babbage (1997). She has also written introductions to several works by Elizabeth Gaskell.

Uglow presented The Poet of Albion, a BBC Radio 4 programme on William Blake, part of a series marking the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth; the programme emphasised Blake's radicalism.^[25][26] She has also twice appeared on the Radio 4 discussion programme, In Our Time.^[27] She acted as a historical consultant on several period dramas for the BBC, including Wives and Daughters (1999), Daniel Deronda (2002), He Knew He Was Right (2004), North and South (2004), Bleak House (2005) and Cranford (2007), as well as for the films Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Miss Potter (2006).^[6][28]

The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future 1730–1810 won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography (2002), and the Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history of the International PEN (2003).^[29][30] Her biographies Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories and Hogarth: A Life and a World were both shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize for biography, and several of her books have reached the shortlist or longlist of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction.^[3][31] According to the charity Booktrust, Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick was the nonfiction work most often selected as "book of the year" by critics in 2006.^[32] In These Times, her study of the home front during the Napoleonic Wars, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize in 2014.^[33]

Uglow is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.^[34] She is a past chair of its Council,^[35] and as of 2017, serves as one of its vice-presidents.^[36] She was awarded the society's Benson Medal in 2012.^[37] She has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Birmingham, University of Kent, Staffordshire University and Birmingham City University.^{[38][39][40][41]} In 2008, she was awarded the OBE for services to literature and publishing.^[1] In 2010, she succeeded Aeronwy Thomas as president of the Alliance of Literary Societies.^[42]

For Mr Lear, Uglow was awarded with the Hawthornden Prize in 2018.

This list is incomplete; you can help by adding missing items. (August 2023)

Biographies and studies

• George Eliot, Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 1987, ISBN 9780860684008
• Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Faber & Faber, 1993, ISBN 9780571170364
• Henry Fielding Northcote House Publishers, Limited, 1995, ISBN 9780746307601
• Hogarth: A Life and a World, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997, ISBN 9780374171698 ebook edition. Faber & Faber. 2010. ISBN 9780571266654.
• Dr Johnson, His Club and Other Friends, National Portrait Gallery, 1998, ISBN 9781855142329
• The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2002. ISBN 9780374194406.
• Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography (later editions with Maggy Hendry; 4th edn; 2005)
• Nature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. Faber & Faber, Limited. 2006. ISBN 9780571236442.; University of Chicago Press, 2009, ISBN 9780226823911
• Words and Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition, Faber, 2008; Faber & Faber, 2011, ISBN 9780571266647
• A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. Macmillan. 2010. ISBN 9781429964227.^[a]
• The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine—Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary. Faber & Faber. 2012. ISBN 9780571290451.; Macmillan, 2013, ISBN 9780374232870^[b]
• Uglow, Jenny (2014). In these times : living in Britain through Napoleon's wars, 1793-1815. London: Faber & Faber.
  • U.S. edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
• Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 2017. First U.S. edition: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018. ISBN 9780374113339.
• Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ISBN 9780374272128.

Other nonfiction

• A Little History of British Gardening. Random House UK. 2005. ISBN 9780712664943.; Random House, 2012, ISBN 9781448104963; 1st edition. Chatto & Windus. 2004.^[c]

As editor

• Walter Pater: Essays on Literature and Art (1973)
• Shaking a Leg: Collected Writings (by Angela Carter) Chatto & Windus, 1997, ISBN 9780701163365
• The Vintage Book of Ghosts (1997)
• Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention (with Francis Spufford; 1997)

• Uglow, Jenny (21 September 2002). "Sexing the plants". The Guardian. Retrieved 12 March 2015.
• Jenny Uglow, "Stepping Out of Byron's Shadow" (review of Miranda Seymour, In Byron's Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Byron's Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, Pegasus, 2018, 547 pp.; and[Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice, Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, Bodleian Library, 2018, 114 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 18 (22 November 2018), pp. 30–32.

In these times

• Wilson, Frances (21 November 2014). "Faces in the crowd : as Napoleon roamed, the home front was feverish". New Statesman. 143 (5237): 42–43.
• Damrosch, Leo (30 January 2015). "Review: In These Times by Jenny Uglow". The New York Times.

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Notes

• Literature

• Jenny Uglow website