Alexandra Harris and Hermione Lee

Literary critic and cultural historian Professor Alexandra Harris and literary biographer Dame Professor Hermione Lee talk about their work and discuss questions of patterning, structure, handling of time and paths not taken.

Harris returns to her childhood home in West Sussex for her latest book, The Rising Down: Lives in a Sussex Landscape, and uncovers a place she realises that she barely knew at all. She probes beneath the surface of the place where she grew up and asks who stood there and what they saw. She imagines the lives of local people from the painter John Constable and the modernist writer Ford Madox Ford to lost local women who left little trace. Harris is professor of English at the University of Birmingham. She is author of Romantic Moderns: English Writers, Artists and the Imagination from Virginia Woolf to John Piper, winner of the Guardian First Book Award, and a Somerset Maugham Award, and of Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies.

Lee is emeritus professor of English literature at the University of Oxford and one of the UK’s foremost literary biographers. Her most recent work was Tom Stoppard: A life, which draws on extensive research into his Czech origins and childhood in India, interviews with his friends and access to his private papers, and yet concludes that he is ultimately unknowable. Lee’s others biographies include ones of Virginia Woolf,  Edith Wharton and Penelope Fitzgerald.