Uglow, Jenny

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Uglow, Jenny

(Jennifer Uglow, Jennifer S. Uglow)

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Faber & Faber Ltd., 3 Queen Sq., London WC1N 3AU, England.

CAREER: Biographer, c. 1987–. Chatto & Windus (publisher), London, England, editorial director.

MEMBER: Royal Society of Literature (fellow), Gaskell Society (vice president).

AWARDS, HONORS: James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, 2002, and Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history, International PEN, both for The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World.

WRITINGS:

(As Jennifer S. Uglow) George Eliot, Virago (London, England), 1987.

Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1993, 1994.

Henry Fielding, University Press of Mississippi (Jackson, MS), 1996.

William Hogarth: A Life and a World, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1997.

The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World, Farrar, Straus & Giroux (New York, NY), 2002.

A Little History of British Gardening, Random House (New York, NY), 2004.

EDITOR

(As Jennifer S. Uglow) Walter Pater, Essays on Literature and Art, J.M. Dent (London, England), 1973.

(As Jennifer S. Uglow; with William Twining) Law Publishing and Legal Information: Small Jurisdictions of the British Isles, Sweet & Maxwell (London, England), 1981.

(As Jennifer Uglow) The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography, Macmillan (London, England), 1982, 3rd edition published as The Northeastern Dictionary of Women's Biography, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1999.

(As Jennifer Uglow) Anthony Trollope, The Prime Minister, introduction by John McCormick, Oxford University Press (Oxford, England), 1983.

Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, J.M. Dent (London, England), 1983.

(As Jennifer Uglow; with Kathleen McLuskie) John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, Bristol Classical (Bristol, England), 1989.

(And author of introduction) The Chatto Book of Ghosts, Chatto & Windus (London, England), 1994 published as The Vintage Book of Ghosts, Vintage (London, England), 1997.

(And author of introduction) Elizabeth Gaskell, Curious, If True: Strange Tales, Virago (London, England), 1995.

(As Jennifer Uglow) Elizabeth Gaskell, My Lady Ludlow, Academy Chicago (Chicago, IL), 1995.

(With Francis Spufford) Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time, and Invention, Faber & Faber (London, England), 1996.

Dr. Johnson, His Club, and Other Friends, National Portrait Gallery (London, England), 1998.

SIDELIGHTS: More of a literary analysis than a biography, Jenny Uglow's book George Eliot examines how it was that an emancipated woman opposed the emancipation of women, or at least did not support the suffragist movement in England. According to Uglow, in her fiction Eliot was more concerned with describing the world as it was than with trying to change it. Uglow later reported that while working on the Eliot book, she became fascinated by the difference between Eliot and Elizabeth Gaskell: Eliot cut herself off from commitments, as did many women writers, while Gaskell had a family, took part in the work of her parish, traveled, and had an energetic social life, all at the same time she was writing. Uglow was inspired to write Gaskell's biography. According to reviewer Gillian Avery in the Times Literary Supplement, the result—Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories—"is likely to remain the definitive work for many years to come." Uglow's 544-page treatment focuses on Gaskell's life (1810–1865) as well as its context, and the biography includes critical studies of its subject's shorter works and novels. This, according to John Bayley in the London Review of Books, "is the real and more unusual virtue of [Uglow's] biography.

Uglow compiled and edited several editions of The International Dictionary of Women's Biography. Of the second edition, a reviewer in the Wilson Library Bulletin noted that "Uglow continues to offer a solid, reliable biographical dictionary of women."

William Hogarth (1697–1764) was an engraver-turned-artist, with the difference (for his time) that instead of learning his craft by copying the great masters, he preferred to paint street scenes. He was, according to Bruce Cook in the Washington Post, "the 18th-century equivalent of a master photo journalist," an artist who documented his age, caricatured it and skewered it. Uglow's biography, Hogarth: A Life and a World, presents the artist in context, and according to Cook, her subject was a focal figure: "Through him she focuses upon all of 18th-century London…. [She] paints a huge canvas of the city in a time when the modern age was struggling to be born."

Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time and Invention was inspired by Charles Babbage's never-completed Victorian mechanical calculator. The book is a discussion of the relationship between arts and science; one of the essays makes the point that science in England has always been looked upon with suspicion by England's politically conservative power structure, while another takes the tack that the decline of manufacturing in England is the result of, in the words of an online commentator for New Scientist, the "semifeudal political system." The book consists of thirteen essays and covers the period from the 1790s to the present. According to Andrew Barry in the New Statesman and Society, "Cultural Babbage brings the unstable borders of technology and culture momentarily into focus. In the era of cyberspaces and virtual realities, such clarity is to be welcomed."