Jenny Uglow Explained

Jenny Uglow
Nationality:British
Genre:Non-fiction
Genres:-->
Subject:Arts
Subjects:-->
Notablework:-->
Spouse:Steve Uglow, m. 1971
Partners:-->
Children:4
Awards:James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Hessell-Tiltman Prize
Marfield Prize

Jennifer Sheila Uglow ([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.

Personal life

Uglow was brought up in Cumbria and later Dorset. She attended Cheltenham Ladies' College (1958–64) and St Anne's College, University of Oxford.[3] [4] After gaining a first in English, she took a BLitt. 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] [5]

Career

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.[5]

She is an honorary visiting professor at the University of Warwick,[6] vice-president of the Gaskell Society[7] and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust.[8] She was formerly a member of the British Library's Advisory Group for the Humanities.

Biographies

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,[9] [10] though later versions have involved other editors. Uglow later wrote:

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".[11] [12]

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).[13]

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,[14] and a review of The Lunar Men in The Observer claims "never has the eighteenth century come so much to life."[15] 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."[16] Frances Spalding considers Nature's Engraver to be "immeasurably enriched by Uglow's canny grasp of period detail."[17] 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."[18]

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."[19] 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.[20] 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."[21]

Other writing and editing

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".[5] 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.[22] [23]

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.

Radio, television and film

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.[24] [25] She has also twice appeared on the Radio 4 discussion programme, In Our Time.[26] 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).[27]

Awards and honours

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).[28] [29] 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.[22] [30] 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.[31] In These Times, her study of the home front during the Napoleonic Wars, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize in 2014.[32]

Uglow is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.[33] She is a past chair of its Council,[34] and as of 2017, serves as one of its vice-presidents. She was awarded the society's Benson Medal in 2012. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Birmingham, University of Kent, Staffordshire University and Birmingham City University.[35] [36] [37] [38] 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.[39]

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

Bibliography

Books

Biographies and studies
University of Chicago Press, 2009,
Macmillan, 2013, [41]
Other nonfiction
Random House, 2012, ; Book: 1st edition . 2004 . Chatto & Windus. [42]
As editor

Articles

Critical studies and reviews of Uglow's work

In these times

———————

Notes

See also

External links

Notes and References

  1. (accessed 5 February 2008).
  2. http://www.uglow.co.uk/kent.htm Uglow Family History: Uglows in Kent
  3. http://www.clcguild.org/news/documents/slab_autumn_2005_002.pdf Spotlight: Guild members in print. The Slab 2005
  4. http://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/about/distinguished_alumnae.html St Anne's College, University of Oxford: Distinguished alumnae
  5. http://www.jennyuglow.com/ Jenny Uglow website
  6. http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/people/academic/uglowprofj Warwick University: English and Comparative Literary Studies: Permanent Academic Staff: Prof. J. Uglow
  7. http://gaskellsociety.co.uk/society.html The Gaskell Society Committee
  8. http://www.wordsworth.org.uk/information/index.asp?pageid=212 The Wordsworth Trust Trustees and Fellows
  9. http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-173229271.html Searing SE. Biographical reference works for and about women, from the advent of the women's liberation movement to the present: an exploratory analysis. Library Trends (22 September 2007)
  10. http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=269103 Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography:, 4th Edition
  11. Easson, Angus, Further reading. In: Gaskell, EC. Ruth, p. xxvii (Penguin Classics; 1997) (accessed 6 February 2008).
  12. Hamilton S. Gaskell then and now. In: The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Matus JL, ed.), p. 187 (Cambridge University Press; 2007).
  13. Buchan, James (14 September 2002), "Reaching for the moon", Guardian (accessed 6 February 2008)
  14. A. S. Byatt "Take a leaf out of their books", The Guardian, 25 November 2006, accessed 8 February 2008.
  15. [Gaby Wood|Wood, Gaby]
  16. Peter Ackroyd, The Times (quoted at the author's website; accessed 7 February 2008)
  17. Spalding, Frances (30 September 2006), "The world in miniature", The Guardian (accessed 8 February 2008).
  18. http://www.erudit.org/revue/ron/1997/v/n8/005780ar.html Chandler D. Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World. (Book review) Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997)
  19. Byatt, AS (7 December 2002),In: "Personal best", The Guardian (accessed 7 February 2008).
  20. Kimmelman, Michael (30 November 1997), "An 18th-Century Paparazzo". The New York Times (accessed 8 February 2008).
  21. http://www.newstatesman.com/200611130052 Macdonald H. On birds and beauty. New Statesman (13 November 2006)
  22. http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/speakerCloseUp.asp?speakerID=666 RSA Lectures: Jenny Uglow
  23. http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?PID=269103 Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography: Author Biographies
  24. http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/blake.shtml BBC Radio 4: William Blake anniversary
  25. https://archive.today/20130421051436/http://www.spectator.co.uk/the-magazine/arts/376381/radical-prophet.thtml Chisholm K. Radical prophet: The Poet of Albion (Radio Four). The Spectator (28 November 2007)
  26. BBC website: In Our Time: The Discovery of Oxygen & The Lunar Society (accessed 5 February 2008).
  27. https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0880101/ IMDb: Jenny Uglow
  28. http://www.ed.ac.uk/explore/people/jamestaitblack/biography.html James Tait Black Memorial Prizes: Previous winners – Biography
  29. http://www.englishpen.org/prizes/hesselltiltmanarchiveandhist/ Hessell-Tiltman Prize – Archive & History
  30. http://www.thesamueljohnsonprize.co.uk/previous-winners.htm Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction: Previous Winners, Shortlists and Judges
  31. http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,,1988924,00.html Rickett J. The bookseller. The Guardian (13 January 2007)
  32. Web site: Jenny Uglow . Faber and Faber . 2 January 2019.
  33. http://www.rslit.org/fellows.htm Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature
  34. Web site: Gaisford . Sue . Jenny Uglow is to be the next Chair of the RSL . Royal Society of Literature . 2 January 2019.
  35. http://www.publications.bham.ac.uk/annual-review-03/honours.htm University of Birmingham: Honours and Awards 2003
  36. http://www.kent.ac.uk/news/stories/hondegrees/2003 University of Kent: Top comedian and actor to receive University of Kent Honorary Degree
  37. http://www.staffs.ac.uk/university/honoraries/previous/index.php Staffordshire University: Previous Honorary Awards
  38. http://www.lhds.bcu.ac.uk/news/55 Birmingham City University: Faculty of Law, Humanities, Development and Society: University honour for author Jenny Uglow
  39. http://www.lichfield.gov.uk/sjmuseum/news.asp The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: News
  40. News: Gaskill, Malcolm . A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration by Jenny Uglow: review . 4 October 2009 . .
  41. News: Marshall, Megan . Megan Marshall . Breaking New Ground Review: The Pinecone by Jenny Uglow . 1 February 2013 . The New York Times .
  42. News: Sinclair, Jill . Review: Potted history A Little History of British Gardening by Jenny Uglow . 18 June 2004 . The Guardian .

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "Jenny Uglow".

Except where otherwise indicated, Everything.Explained.Today is © Copyright 2009-2024, A B Cryer, All Rights Reserved. Cookie policy.