Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther) is a British biographer, critic and publisher. The editorial director of Chatto & Windus, she has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled a women's biographical dictionary.
She won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 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.
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 B.Litt. In 1971, she married Steve Uglow, a professor of criminal justice at the University of Kent; the couple have three sons and a daughter. As of 2008, Uglow lives at Canterbury in Kent.
Uglow has worked in publishing since leaving university; as of 2008, she is the 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 encyclopedia 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.
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, including Wives and Daughters (1999), Daniel Deronda (2002), He Knew He Was Right (2004), North and South (2004), Bleak House (2005) and Cranford (2007), as well as for the films Pride and Prejudice (2005) and Miss Potter (2006).
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). 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 three of her books have reached the longlist of the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-fiction. 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.
Uglow is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Birmingham, University of Kent, Staffordshire University and Birmingham City University. In 2008, she was awarded the OBE for services to literature and publishing. In 2010, she succeeded Aeronwy Thomas as President of the Alliance of Literary Societies.
