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Public Lecture: '"Ellmann’s Joyce": Zachary Leader in Conversation with Hermione Lee'
Date: 11/11/2025
Time: 1730-1900
Location: Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College
Join OCLW for an evening with scholar and biographer Zachary Leader in conversation with Hermione Lee.
‘a case study, in effect, for the stakes of thinking about biography as an art.’
—Michelle Taylor, The Nation
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as ‘the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century’. Frank Kermode thought the book would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a prediction that was if anything too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a preeminent modernist.
Ellmann’s Joyce provides the biography of the biography, exploring how Ellmann came to his subject, gained the cooperation of Joyce’s family and estate, shrewdly, doggedly collected vital papers and interviews, placated publishers, thwarted competitors, and carefully balanced narrative with literary analysis. Ellmann’s Joyce also removes the veil from the biographer—richly rewarded in public, admirable in private life, but also possessed of a startling secret life. The book constructs a powerful argument not only in support of Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims but also on behalf of literary biography generally.
I have always been grateful to Ellmann for taking such a democratising approach to this most despotic of authors, just as I am now to Leader for following suit […] what Zachary Leader gives us is a richly researched, nuanced portrait of the earlier life and working processes of a writer who not only shone light into one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century, but, in the process, became one in his own right.
—Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement
Speaker Details:
Zachary Leader is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He is the author or editor of a dozen books on modern British and American literature, among them biographies of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow. He is the General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. From 1998 to 2008, she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW at Wolfson College in 2011. She has just completed a biography of the novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, which will be published in 2026.
Further Details and Contacts:
This in-person event is free and open to all. Registration is recommended.
The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Registration will close at 1430 on 11/11/2025.
Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.
Date: 11/11/2025
Time: 1730-1900
Location: Leonard Wolfson Auditorium, Wolfson College
Join OCLW for an evening with scholar and biographer Zachary Leader in conversation with Hermione Lee.
‘a case study, in effect, for the stakes of thinking about biography as an art.’
—Michelle Taylor, The Nation
Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as ‘the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century’. Frank Kermode thought the book would ‘fix Joyce’s image for a generation’, a prediction that was if anything too cautious. The biography won the National Book Award and durably secured Joyce’s standing as a preeminent modernist.
Ellmann’s Joyce provides the biography of the biography, exploring how Ellmann came to his subject, gained the cooperation of Joyce’s family and estate, shrewdly, doggedly collected vital papers and interviews, placated publishers, thwarted competitors, and carefully balanced narrative with literary analysis. Ellmann’s Joyce also removes the veil from the biographer—richly rewarded in public, admirable in private life, but also possessed of a startling secret life. The book constructs a powerful argument not only in support of Ellmann’s intellectual and artistic claims but also on behalf of literary biography generally.
I have always been grateful to Ellmann for taking such a democratising approach to this most despotic of authors, just as I am now to Leader for following suit […] what Zachary Leader gives us is a richly researched, nuanced portrait of the earlier life and working processes of a writer who not only shone light into one of the great literary minds of the twentieth century, but, in the process, became one in his own right.
—Eimear McBride, Times Literary Supplement
Speaker Details:
Zachary Leader is an Emeritus Professor of English Literature at the University of Roehampton. He is the author or editor of a dozen books on modern British and American literature, among them biographies of Kingsley Amis and Saul Bellow. He is the General Editor of The Oxford History of Life-Writing, a seven-volume series, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Hermione Lee was President of Wolfson College from 2008 to 2017 and is Emeritus Professor of English Literature in the English Faculty at Oxford University. She is a biographer and critic whose work includes biographies of Virginia Woolf (1996), Edith Wharton (2006), Penelope Fitzgerald (2013), and Tom Stoppard (2020). She has also written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Philip Roth, and Willa Cather, an OUP Very Short Introduction to Biography, and a collection of essays on life-writing, Body Parts. She was awarded the Biographers’ Club Prize for Exceptional Contribution to Biography in 2018. From 1998 to 2008, she was the Goldsmiths’ Professor of English Literature at Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and the Royal Society of Literature and a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, she was made GBE for services to English Literature. She founded OCLW at Wolfson College in 2011. She has just completed a biography of the novelist and art historian Anita Brookner, which will be published in 2026.
Further Details and Contacts:
This in-person event is free and open to all. Registration is recommended.
The event will be recorded and made available on the OCLW website soon after. Registration is not required to access the recording.
Registration will close at 1430 on 11/11/2025.
Queries regarding this event should be addressed to OCLW Events Manager, Dr Eleri Anona Watson.