This book shows why Hermione Lee is a star among British biographers. Generous, witty, provocative, and blissfully free of academic jargon, it takes us into the heart of the current debate about the nature and value of life writing. Lee's meticulous readings constantly give rise to the largest, most challenging questions about the genre. Playful but always wonderfully erudite, this is a superb collection that will prove immensely influential. -- Richard Holmes, author of "Shelley: The Pursuit" Hermione Lee, a biographer justly noted for her scrupulous erudition, tact, and grace of expression, is expert at sifting the telling, resonant detail from the litter of evidence that might overwhelm less observant and meticulous minds. These concise and witty essays enrich our understanding of what, either by necessity or choice, may go into and what may be left out of the writing of any life. Yet even when warning us of how much is missing or guessed at in any biography, Lee doesn't let much worth knowing get by her. -- Maria DiBattista, Princeton University Lee has the rare ability to combine scrupulously careful scholarship with writing that is clear, imaginative, witty, and simply a delight to read. In these wide-ranging essays on various aspects of "life-writing," she takes readers behind the scenes of the biographical process, reflecting on the inevitable gaps and absences of evidence, on the human need for stories, on the film of The Hours, on death--as the end of a life and the end of a Life--with singular brilliance and insight. -- Jean Strouse, Director, Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library

Lee's immensely enjoyable study will energize debate among thoughtful readers and should become essential reading for aficionados of literary biography. Publishers Weekly Lee's tales of the battles of the biographers are gripping and vivid. There is a lightness of touch for stories of story-making that are often funny... The nose is a funny thing anyway; stick it on to 'Virginia Woolf' or any other of the illustrious names Lee discusses, and you are bound to bring them down a peg. All part of the biographer's power to make or unmake, sniff out or sniff at, which Lee so engagingly shows us. -- Rachel Bowlby Financial Times Hermione Lee, biographer of Woolf and Willa Cather, acknowledges the 'messy, often contradictory' nature of the craft of biography... Lee concedes [that] Woolf--as any subject--will continue to be reinvented; any life, protean and elusive, refuses to be owned. -- Linda Simon Biography Lee is able to give the reader an authoritative glimpse of the difficulties that must be overcome when tackling a literary biography... Well written, insightful, and enjoyable. Library Journal So many fine literary biographers are practicing that the genre itself is the subject of books with surprising frequency. The most alluring, eccentric and thoughtful example I've come across recently is Virginia Woolf's Nose: Essays on Biography by Dame Hermione Lee. -- George Fatherling Books in Canada Monumental and long-needed... So much is here for future scholars to use and appreciate from this tremendous and substantive quarry of Stracheyan biographical material. -- Jay Dickson Woolf Studies Annual The four essays are the equivalent of listening to a smart, kind and personable professor holding forth on her favorite subject... These essays are everywhere informed by the fact that Lee is such an accomplished biographer, a writer who knows the ropes. -- Julia Keller Chicago Tribune For proof of Hermione Lee's expertise in biography (or, to use the technical term, 'life-writing'), one need only consider her massive and important Virginia Woolf. [There] is a lot to like about this book: for reminding us that Woolf herself was no apologist for the ceremony of death, which she studiously avoids in her fictions; ... and, for writing an accessible and literate treatment of life-writing. For this and for de-mystifying the genre for a post-modern audience, we can thank Hermione Lee. -- Karen Levenback Virginia Woolf Miscellany

Hermione Lee is a Fellow of New College, Oxford, and the first woman Goldsmith's Professor of English Literature at Oxford University. She is a critic and biographer who has published books on "Elizabeth Bowen", "Philip Roth", "Willa Cather", and "Virginia Woolf". She is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a Fellow of the British Academy, and, from 2004 to 2005, a Mel and Lois Tukman Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. In 2003 she was awarded the CBE for services to literature.

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Shelley's Heart and Pepys's Lobsters 5 Chapter 2: Virginia Woolf's Nose37 Chapter 3: Jane Austen Faints 63 Chapter 4: How to End It All 95 Notes 123 Index 135