of influence in the field. the collection is still growing. -- lives of virginia of

wolf and edith. she is the author of several nonfiction books including philip roth body parts and a biography a very short introduction. this is about half an hour. >> you are watching book tv on c-span2, 48 hours of books every weekend and we are in london interviewing authors and want to introduce you to hermione lee. ms. lee first of all what is your day job? >> guest: i am the president at a graduate college in oxford and international interdisciplinary college where lots of graduate students come to study. >> when you say oxford was the organization? where is the university.

it's everywhere and nowhere because the university is an entity in which there are a number of colleges in medieval days they have their own habits so each of these colleges have a hand who looks after it for the time they, are there. those students will be studying within the departments and faculties at the university of the hole so the college is like their home. >> so there is an oxford university. >> there is and with canada there is all kind of federal entities which we sometimes call silos. but it works as a complicated whole that has grown up in many centuries. so you've got departments, the university administration and call colleges each of which have their own distinct character.

it has a special feel to it because it was founded in the 1960's by who was very keen on american culture and civilization and was also a famously liberal philosophers and he wanted to found a college particularly for graduate students he didn't have much of a home at oxford at that time and he had the principles of secularism, egalitarianism, so you probably is as the oxford colleges with the cobblestones and it is the opposite of that. they are all mixed together and this dividends on all of the kennedys say that it's very egalitarian. so it works interesting. >> we talked with the professor who founded a new college in the college for the humanities and

he talked about it being secular is that a trend, something different? >> it is a completely different kind of organization oxford university is a different kind of organization from that new invention. but i suppose there is increasing secularization and education as in many walks of life in britain. >> as a college president do you find your spending most of your time on administration matters? >> just making sure things are going well for the students trying to bring in as much

activity as can be in the college's. you are presenting the college to the outside world of because although to be outside it might seem it looks like a very wealthy place in fact individual colleges and individual studies like the humanities are underfunded and so one of the jobs of the colleges to try to raise the college environment. >> is that something that's been going on for quite awhile? >> much better in the situation. it's relatively new for every college to have its own development director i would say. >> we invited hermione lee morel's and author and a college

president but there is a segue as a college president is it important for you to be a published author and is it important that the college professors published? >> it's not a general rule because the heads of oxford and cambridge colleges come from many different kinds of backgrounds so they could be from the civil service, they could be from the media or they could be authors or economists so those are the rules looking for the published author and quite the contrary the colleges are looking for a new head in this country quite often tend to go for someone who's good at figures or business or has been an administration of civil service. i think my college wanted a slight change. they never appointed a woman before. i think they were interested in

having someone in the humanities so the answer is no you don't have to be the head of an oxford college but they've chosen because the rest of my life has been as a teacher and writer and academic then i think they want you to go on doing that. they don't want you to just stop and just be the head of the college. >> hermione lee what is the oxford center for life writing? >> it's something i said that at willson college and it gave me the opportunity to do that. there are quite a few things both in britain and in the states in an academic context now. it allows people to come to do all kinds of activities connected with all the different ways of talking about a life story or prevein letter writing,

memoir, documentary films. the advantage of life writing is it is very broad so it's not just talking about the biography of the autobiography it is about all of those mixed that we just had a series on the lives in ways in which having a portrait painted or looking at portraits tells you something about the story so we have the disciplines in that way and we even have sessions where we talk to people about the book writing and held them with those books. >> one of your most recent books biography very short introduction how do you write a biography? >> many ways of writing a biography as there are in the

20th century biography people sometimes forget it is as hard or harder to write a good life than it is to lead one. you can do the chronological met it or take different scenes and approach a person's life from the outside, you can tell the story. it seems to me there are no rules. there are conventions that there are no rules. >> how did you start virginia woolf, how did you finish it? >> i started with a quotation from virginia will that ranked how does one write a biography because she herself was very interested in the ways in which you have the conventions of life riding where you take someone threw and go through that professional life and the public act of their life. she was very interested in the way that was so different from the way we actually li lives day to day.

where we are complete confusion of anxiety in the thinking about different things at once bits of our lives clashing so that we have a public place as it were but all kinds of other things like the goings on inside that and she felt in her day, she was in the early 20th century, but conventional biography is a traditional biography that started the kind of lives and letters but didn't really get close to the secrets of the life so one of the reasons i was interested in writing because i was so fascinated by the inquiry of the critique biography. >> how well known was she in her time? >> that is a good question. she was known in her time particularly by the 1930's. she killed herself in 1941.

she was known as the writer of the elite experimental unusual a original novel. she was known as a critic because she writes a lot of critical essays and she was known as a social figure belonging to a particular group. she was also known in her time as a feminist because she wrote a very important essays one about the situation of women in her country at that time. after she died, her reputation kind of took a dip in that often happens that just after the reputation goes down and gets picked up later and in the 60's movement she was recuperated and

people came back to her then there was a lot of posthumous publication because she left behind huge amounts of unpublished materials and an edited materials so she had a major dramatic afterlife and i think her reputation from the late 60's and onward became one of the famous writers in the english language and one of the most influential writers and argued about because there were so many people particularly in my country. >> why was she argued about? >> she was arguing about because people see her in very different ways. it's interesting. many are just seen one way. there was virginia woolf, the very name for some people

conjures up a privileged rather precious community, slightly spoiled in the vegetables who have enough private income they don't have to work for a living soul that wasn't the case, they did need to earn their money and who could indulge in experimental writing and because she could be tremendously unpleasant -- i can't idealize her she has a reputation for being catty and snooty in all those british things. so a lot of people hate her and there is a grammar school educated mainly men. they get all of the families and

get educated and have everything to do what virginia woolf with hatred actually. it's real hatred. in other countries she's described very differently. if you go to the conference is in france, she is a tragic heroine whose tremendously romanticized and in america i think she's much more of a political heroin than someone that is paradoxically very radical and very left wing and socialist and feminist. but she actually was in her thinking so she's a very complicated figure and changes when people look at different ways. >> who is this group, hermione lee? >> the bloomsbury group was only

called the bloomsbury group after a group of friends. it was cambridge for instance this is essentially a group of young men who got to know each other in cambridge. toby who was the brother of virginia woolf and he died young to get to know each other in cambridge and then they moved to london and they took up these big houses in the 18th-century squares and that is the name the bloomsbury group. they stayed together along the edges of the group like elliot but basically it is a group of people that married, they had a homosexual relations with each other, they had all kinds of relationships, they would

gossip, they had a good time, they were very talented and they did create a new kind of cliche and if you are in it you are part of it and don't think of yourself as being in a cliche. the head is an incredibly talented people within. they were one of the influential economists of the century. >> why did you choose to write a biography of edith wharton? >> i've been fascinated all my life with american literature and american women writers of these writers absolutely fascinate me, and i think it is because i am deeply interested

in american culture and i'm also interested in american writers but wanted to carve out in the original voice for themselves who were at odds with their american backgrounds or society and were deeply influenced by european writing cultures so quite often feel themselves not at home in america. and i just love edith wharton's booktv she's one of the greatest novelists. i love her wonderful ironic treatment of society. i love the way she fills her books up with the social habits and lives and details of her time and what is absolutely wonderful of her is a mixture of

cool ironic wit and the deep passion net identification with people whose lives have gone wrong and who haven't gotten what they wanted in life and have been left. she is a writer. >> did she write about the same class that virginia woolf would write about? >> financially it's just, you know, there is a whole ocean between these writers. edith wharton became of the wealthy age generation and have a lot of money. edith wharton would have taken one look at blum's very come in fact she was scornful and rather

reprehensible. edith wharton made these beautiful homes the two houses in france. she's the kind of person who sends her servants ahead so that by the time she gets they're the silk and satin sheets on the bed and that all callers polished up, being sort of comical about it because there is a level of worth in expenditure that is impressive. at the same time, unlike the contemporaries of the gilded age, this woman was a professional writer who didn't like conspicuous consumption, she didn't like spending for the sake of it and she wanted to make beautiful homes and gardens

so that her friends would come over and have an interesting time. her greatest passion was literature, art, paintings and a gardening. to identify edith wharton with high spending millionaires on fifth avenue is wrong she is a more private person than that but she had a lot of money and spend it well. >> this is book tv on c-span2. we are in london and talking with hermione lee author and president of the college of oxford. and another topic, does she fit into this virginia woolf and edith wharton mix? >> i'm not sure that biographers any more than fiction writers do things according to a plan. i have an interest in women

writers and an american literature and and very interested in these strong independent of original women who don't get easily classified as feminist or, you know, but i actually think that they are different kind of novelists and what links them together is a passion that and rather stringent interest in language. they want to use the best possible language. >> what are you currently working on? >> i just finished a biography called penelope fitzgerald who became known in the state's for

the blue flower that came out in the year 1996, i think maybe 1997 in america. she started very late. she was the daughter of a very distinguished and interesting family. her uncle was a convert to catholicism and her father was the editor of a british magazine and so she had a very clever professional middle class family she married someone who was unlucky. she then a very brilliant student at oxford and started writing at 16 and became famous at 18 with a novel called the blue flower. it's an interesting story about waiting. it's actually very encouraging when you read stories about

mozart and those that start very young but it's nice to hear about someone who finds there's ralph very late in life. she read like 13 buckson 20 years and started by writing about her own life so one of the episodes is that she and her brother at that time chaotic family lived on a barge in chelsea and it sank. she wrote a wonderful novel called off shore about the barge that sinks. she was teaching at the time and said to her class i'm sorry i'm late but my house st.. unusual excuse. so she was working in the bbc, trying to run a bookshop living

on this borge and then there came a point in her life, very late she decided she didn't want to do that anymore as she started writing in extraordinary series of historical novels one set in italy in the 1950's just after the war and thus the blue flower was set in germany and a novel called the beginning of spring. she does this extraordinary thing she does all this homework, she knows everything there is to know and then she kind of compresses it down so you read these 150 page books and you feel that you are in this world completely inhibited so i found this very intriguing and nobody's written about her, the family asked me to do it but i've never done a book on someone that i knew and someone whose families are around so it is a completely different kind

of challenge. >> did she write historical fiction? >> that's what you'd call it. it's winning all of the prizes and that is what you associate with historical fiction. but when i see it it doesn't sound quite right because it is like as if she disappears inside this particular historical world and without giving 500 pages of description, she just by inference makes you feel as if you are living in that place with those people. it is a ghost writing the past. >> talk eni together those biographies that you are working on or worked on into a biography in a very short introduction, did you approach all of them the same way? have you developed a formula?

>> the word formula is slightly heart sinking isn't it? you're going to apply a formula on top of these people and will come out that. i do think that you need to be -- if you are a literary biographer and i am a literary critic and i to the biography because i'm interested in the work and i want to find out that until the year relationship between the work and the life and if you are a literary biographer you have to think hard about the kind of work that your subject does. so with virginia woolf, who was herself so critical of experimental ideas on how you tell a life story i actually, the formula if you like, i try to -- i didn't want to write it chronologically have all. i wanted to write it in the scenes and you have to have that

back. but i kind of moved the story through when i would collect together certain aspects of her life and then move on from there. there was a series of rooms which writing as a social anthropologist and cutting the slice down to see how these people work so i thought i would do something like that. because her books are so short i found out a lot about her but i wanted her to be scared and also she said i don't want to explain things much it insults the readers. so why haven't wanted to explain

-- the short introduction on the biography was a little bit written on the series where you can just slip into your pocket a book on the kuran or the meaning of life. i will tell you something of what you need to know. so i was talking about all the different kinds of ways that one can approach biography and the history of biography in different ways and they can work, the problems and challenges facing biography said different services to squeeze that together. >> back to virginia woolf, hermione lee. how did she kill herself and why? >> she drown herself on a cold day at the end of march, 1941. the war was taking place all of around them.

her husband was jewish and they had a list ready of the people to be exterminated when the invasion took place they knew they were on that list and they had discussed suicide which at that time people thought was quite probable in a perfectly rational way. she had fought with phases of a mental illness we will describe as manic depression or bipolar. i find the terminology difficult because the was different at different times. there was a period in her life that she suffered from hallucinations but i don't think one would call her a schizophrenic. the imposing of the terminologies were difficult but

she was very vulnerable. with the help of her husband who was tremendously supporting and was a particularly vulnerable phase she was very fragile when she finished a book. she suffered from a lack of confidence, she always felt depressed but she never realized. she was writing her own a bit of life writing, a memoir of her childhood partly to get away with the presence of the war. she was trying to go back in her mind finding reading a