Hermione Lee won international acclaim and awards for her biographies of Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather, and her Edith Wharton (2007) is considered the definitive modern biography of one of America's most famous women of letters. Delving into heretofore untapped sources, Lee does away with the image of the snobbish bluestocking and gives us a new Wharton - tough, startlingly modern, as brilliant and complex as her fiction. The President of Wolfson College, University of Oxford, Lee was made a Companion of the British Empire for Services to Literature in 2003.