Dame Hermione Lee (born 29 February 1948[1]) is a British biographer, literary critic and academic.
[4] Lee has taught at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, at the University of Liverpool (where she was awarded an Honorary DLitt in 2002) and at the University of York, from 1977 to 1998, where she held a personal chair in the Department of English and Related Literature, and where she received an Honorary DLitt in 2007.
[5] She succeeded Sir Gareth Roberts as the sixth President of Wolfson College, Oxford, in 2008, serving until the end of academic year 2016–17.
Lee has written widely on women writers, American literature, life-writing, and modern fiction.
Her books include The Novels of Virginia Woolf (1977); a study of the Anglo-Irish novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1981, revised 1999); a short critical book, the first published in Britain, on Philip Roth (1982) and a critical biography of the American novelist Willa Cather, Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up (1989, reissued in a revised edition by Virago in 2008).
[13][14] It was announced in 2021 that Chatto & Windus had signed a deal with Lee for her biography of writer Anita Brookner.