Jennifer Sheila UglowOBEFRSL (née Crowther,[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.
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.[3][6]
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,[10][11] though later versions have involved other editors. Uglow later wrote:
I embarked on the Macmillan Biographical Dictionary of Women in a fit of pique because all reference books were full of men: it was a mad undertaking, born of a time when feminists wanted heroines and didn't have Google.[12]
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".[13][14]
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. ByattofNature's Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick,[16] and a review of The Lunar MeninThe Observer claims "never has the eighteenth century come so much to life."[17] 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."[18]Frances Spalding considers Nature's Engraver to be "immeasurably enriched by Uglow's canny grasp of period detail."[19] 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."[20]
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."[21] 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.[22] 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."[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.
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).[29][30] 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.[3][31] 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.[32]In These Times, her study of the home front during the Napoleonic Wars, was shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize in 2014.[33]
Uglow, Jenny (2014). In these times : living in Britain through Napoleon's wars, 1793-1815. London: Faber & Faber.
U.S. edition: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015.
Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 2017. First U.S. edition: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018. ISBN9780374113339.
Sybil & Cyril: Cutting Through Time. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022. ISBN 9780374272128.
Jenny Uglow, "Stepping Out of Byron's Shadow" (review of Miranda Seymour, In Byron's Wake: The Turbulent Lives of Byron's Wife and Daughter: Annabella Milbanke and Ada Lovelace, Pegasus, 2018, 547 pp.; and[Christopher Hollings, Ursula Martin, and Adrian Rice, Ada Lovelace: The Making of a Computer Scientist, Bodleian Library, 2018, 114 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 18 (22 November 2018), pp. 30–32.
Critical studies and reviews of Uglow's work[edit]
In these times
Wilson, Frances (21 November 2014). "Faces in the crowd : as Napoleon roamed, the home front was feverish". New Statesman. 143 (5237): 42–43.
