詹妮·乌格

Jennifer Sheila Uglow (née Crowther, born 1947) is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher, and a former editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically-acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, Edward Lear and Gilbert White, as well as a group biography of the Lunar Society and a panoramic account of living in Britain through the Napoleonic wars.

Among various prizes and awards, she has won the 2002 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 2003 Hessell-Tiltman Prize for The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future 1730–1810, and the 2018 Hawthornden Prize for Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. She has also chaired the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and was awarded the society's Benson Medal in 2012. She has honorary degrees and in 2008, she was awarded the OBE for services to literature and publishing.

Early life and education

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 BLitt.

Career

After leaving university, Uglow worked in publishing and until 2013 was an editorial director of the publishing company Chatto & Windus, an imprint of Random House.

She has been an honorary visiting professor at the University of Warwick, and for many years acted as a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust. She was formerly a member of the British Library's Advisory Group for the Humanities. A fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, she is a past chair of its Council, and as of 2017, serves as one of its vice-presidents. She is also a Fellow of the Linnean Society, Vice-president of the Gaskell Society, and an honorary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.

Biographies

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, though later versions 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.

Her first full-length biographies, depicting the Victorian women writers George Eliot (1987) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1993), continued her interest in documenting women, and her literary background.

Subsequent works moved further into the past, with subjects including the 18th century author Henry Fielding (1995), and artists William Hogarth (1997), Thomas Bewick (2006) and Edward Lear. 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).The Pinecone: A Life of Sarah Losh (2012), tells the story of a pioneering Victorian woman architect, while InThese Times (2014) is a large-scale group biography exploring the home front during the Napoleonic wars. Her latest book A Year with Gilbert White: The First Great Nature Writer (2025) examines the life of the 18th century naturalist Gilbert White through his journal for 1781.

Work on more recent periods includes Sybil and Cyril ( 2021), a joint biography of the 1930s lino-cut artists Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power, and The Quentin Blake Book (2022), which was written to mark the artist’s 90th birthday.

Uglow's biographies have always 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." Her book on Gilbert White was described in The Observer as ”A glorious celebration of curiosity and nature.”

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 has also edited collections of writings by Walter Pater (1973) and Angela Carter (1997), as well as co-editing, with Francis Spufford, Cultural Babbage: Time, Technology and Invention (1997), a selection of essays by scientists and writers.

Radio, television and film

Uglow has taken part in many television and radio programmes, including presentingThe 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. In the past 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).

Awards and honours

Awards and honours

1993: Portico Prize, Elizabeth Gaskell

1995: Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, Elizabeth Gaskell

2002 : James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography, The Lunar Men

2003: Hessell-Tiltman Prize for history, International PEN, The Lunar Men

2007: Marfield Prize, National Award for Arts writing, Nature’s Engraver

2008: OBE for services to literature and publishing

2008: Samuel Johnson Prize, shortlist, A Gambling Man

2012: Benson Prize, Royal Society of Literature

2013: Bill Rollinson Prize for Landscape and Tradition, The Pinecone

2014: Duff Cooper Prize, shortlist, In These Times

2015: Hessel-Tiltman Prize shortlist, In These Times

2018: Hawthornden Prize, Mr Lear

2018: Harvey Darton Award, Children’s Book Society, Mr Lear

Personal life

In 1971, Uglow married Steve Uglow, professor emeritus at the University of Kent; the couple have two sons and two daughters and eight grandchildren. For many years they lived in Canterbury and they now live in Borrowdale, Cumberland.