Jenny Uglow grew up in Cumbria and Dorset and studied English at Oxford. Until 2012, she was Editorial Director of Chatto & Windus, part of Random House.
Her new book, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense is an illustrated biography of Edward Lear, as natural history artist, landscape painter, travel writer and loveable outsider – as well as the much-loved author of ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’ and a host of hilarious limericks.
In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815, is a crowd biography of the experience of different people from all classes and ages – a view of the home front through twenty years of war.
Her books include Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Hogarth: A Life and a World , The Lunar Men: The Friends who Made the Future, Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick, A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration and The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh. She’s also editor of the Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women andThe Vintage Book of Ghosts, and author of short studies of George Eliot and Henry Fielding, as well as A Little History of British Gardening and Words & Pictures, a look at relationships between writers and artists, from the illustrators of Milton and Bunyan, to Dickens and Phiz and Lewis Carroll and Tenniel.
Jenny also reviews for press and radio and has been a historical consultant on BBC classic serials, including Wives and Daughters, Daniel Deronda, The Way We Live Now, He Knew He was Right, North and South, Bleak House, Lost in Austen andLittle Dorrit, as well as the films of Pride and Prejudice, Amazing Grace and Miss Potter.
She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and was created an OBE in 2007. She is married to Steve Uglow, Professor Emeritus at Kent Law School, the University of Kent. They live in Canterbury and Cumbria and have four grown-up children — Tom, Hannah, Jamie and Luke – and six grand-children – Matilda, Max, Felix, Billy, Cassie and Dash.
