Jenny Uglow

Jennifer Sheila Uglow (, (accessed 5 February 2008).
(accessed 19 August 2022). 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. 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.Jenny Uglow website
(accessed 5 February 2008).

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.

She is an honorary visiting professor at the University of Warwick, vice-president of the Gaskell Society and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust. 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 over 2,000 biographies, 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".

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).

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

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." 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. 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."

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". 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''.RSA Lectures: Jenny Uglow
(accessed 5 February 2008).

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. She has also twice appeared on the Radio 4 discussion programme, '' In Our Time''. She acted as a historical consultant on several period dramas for the BBC
...