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Hermione Lee's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Hermione Lee recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Hermione Lee's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Selected Diaries

Virginia Woolf turned to her diary as to an intimate friend, to whom she could freely and spontaneously confide her thoughts on public events or the joys and trials of domestic life. Between 1st January 1915 and her death in 1941 she regularly recorded her thoughts with unfailing grace, courage, honesty and wit. The result is one of the greatest diaries in the English language. less
Recommended by Hermione Lee, and 1 others.

Hermione LeeIt’s an astonishing thing to have decades of almost daily diary entries from a great writer. (Source)

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2

On Being Ill with Notes from Sick Rooms

Recommended by Gavin Francis, Hermione Lee, and 2 others.

Gavin FrancisA really important piece of writing, beautifully executed. (Source)

Hermione LeeShe was often ill, and not just mentally ill, but also physically ill. (Source)

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3

Walter Sickert

A Conversation

Recommended by Hermione Lee, and 1 others.

Hermione LeeShe is always somewhat rivalrous with the painters, and deeply interested in painting. (Source)

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4

The Years

Written in 1937, this was the most popular of Virginia Woolf's novels during her lifetime. It explores a rich variety of themes such as sex, feminism, family life, education and politics in English society from 1800 to the 1930s, as they affect one large middle-class London family.

As the Pargiters, a middle-class English family, move from the oppressive confines of the Victorian home of the 1880s to the `present day' of the 1930s, they are weighed down by the pressures of war, the social strictures of patriarchy, capitalism and Empire, and the rise of Fascism. Engaging with a...
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Recommended by Hermione Lee, and 1 others.

Hermione LeeIt was a big commercial success in her time. Now it’s the least favoured of all her books. (Source)

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5

To the Lighthouse

For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged.
To the Lighthouse is at once a vivid impressionist depiction of a family holiday, and a meditation on a marriage, on parenthood and childhood, on grief, tyranny and bitterness. Its use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives, gives the novel an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an...
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Recommended by Hermione Lee, Deborah Levy, and 2 others.

Hermione LeeWhen all is said and done, I think it is her greatest novel. (Source)

Deborah LevyAristotle tells us that all politics starts in the family, and you really do see that in To the Lighthouse. Woolf always said that there is no symbolism in the lighthouse at all, and I think we should believe her. All the same, I do think that the lighthouse, in a way, is Mrs Ramsay because the lighthouse is there to protect us from harm and from hazards, and Mrs Ramsay is a self-sacrificing,... (Source)

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