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Jennifer Sheila Uglow (, (accessed 5 February 2008). Uglow Family History: Uglows in Kent (accessed 19 August 2022). born 1947) is an English biographer, historian, critic and publisher. She was an editorial director of Chatto & Windus. She has written critically acclaimed biographies of Elizabeth Gaskell, William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick, and Edward Lear, and a history and joint biography of the Lunar Society, among others, and has also compiled The Macmillan Dictionary of Women's Biography.
She 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 her works have twice been shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. She is a past president of the Alliance of Literary Societies and has also chaired the Council of the Royal Society of Literature.
She is an honorary visiting professor at the University of Warwick, Warwick University: English and Comparative Literary Studies: Permanent Academic Staff: Prof. J. Uglow (accessed 5 February 2008) vice-president of the Gaskell Society The Gaskell Society Committee (accessed 6 February 2008) and a trustee of the Wordsworth Trust. The Wordsworth Trust Trustees and Fellows (accessed 6 February 2008). She was formerly a member of the British Library's Advisory Group for the Humanities.
Her first full-length biographies, depicting the Victorian women writers George Eliot (1987) and Elizabeth Gaskell (1993), continue her interest in documenting women and reflect her literary background. Gaskell scholar Angus Easson describes Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories as "the best current biography" of the author, and The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell refers to it as "authoritative".Easson, Angus, Further reading. In: Gaskell, EC. Ruth, p. xxvii (Penguin Classics; 1997) (accessed 6 February 2008).Hamilton S. Gaskell then and now. In: The Cambridge Companion to Elizabeth Gaskell (Matus JL, ed.), p. 187 (Cambridge University Press; 2007).
Subsequent works have moved further into the past, with subjects including 18th century author Henry Fielding (1995), and artists William Hogarth (1997) and Thomas Bewick (2006). 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).Buchan, James (14 September 2002), "Reaching for the moon", Guardian (accessed 6 February 2008)
Uglow's biographies have 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,A. S. Byatt "Take a leaf out of their books", The Guardian, 25 November 2006, accessed 8 February 2008. and a review of The Lunar Men in The Observer claims "never has the eighteenth century come so much to life."Gaby Wood (1 September 2002), "Fly me to the moon...", The Observer (accessed 7 February 2008). Reviewing Hogarth: A Life and a World, Peter Ackroyd wrote, "She depicts the city at first hand, almost as if she herself had been wandering through Hogarth's engravings."Peter Ackroyd, The Times (quoted at the author's website; accessed 7 February 2008) Frances Spalding considers Nature's Engraver to be "immeasurably enriched by Uglow's canny grasp of period detail."Spalding, Frances (30 September 2006), "The world in miniature", The Guardian (accessed 8 February 2008). David Chandler, however, complains that "Uglow tends to amass detail on quotable detail, when sometimes one would like a little more taut synthesis, more interrogation of those details." Chandler D. Jenny Uglow, Hogarth: A Life and a World. (Book review) Romanticism on the Net 8 (November 1997) (accessed 8 February 2008).
Uglow's depiction of scientific thought has also been praised; A. S. Byatt, for example, describes The Lunar Men as "full of ... the real sense that scientific curiosity is as exciting as any 'artistic' pursuit."Byatt, AS (7 December 2002), In: "Personal best", The Guardian (accessed 7 February 2008). Her discussion of art has gained a more mixed reception. The New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman complains that Uglow overvalues Hogarth's paintings and neglects his artistic associates in favour of his literary ones.Kimmelman, Michael (30 November 1997), "An 18th-Century Paparazzo". The New York Times (accessed 8 February 2008). On the other hand, Helen Macdonald, reviewing Nature's Engraver, considers that it is "in her descriptions of the physical process of artistic creation, and her musings on individual engravings, that Uglow is at her most energetic and fluid." Macdonald H. On birds and beauty. New Statesman (13 November 2006) (accessed 8 February 2008).
Uglow has edited collections of writings by Walter Pater (1973) and Angela Carter (1997), as well as co-editing a set of essays about Charles Babbage (1997). She has also written introductions to several works by Elizabeth Gaskell.
Uglow is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Fellows of the Royal Society of Literature (accessed 5 February 2008). She is a past chair of its Council, and as of 2017, serves as one of its vice-presidents. She was awarded the society's Benson Medal in 2012. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Birmingham, University of Kent, Staffordshire University and Birmingham City University. University of Birmingham: Honours and Awards 2003 (accessed 5 February 2008). University of Kent: Top comedian and actor to receive University of Kent Honorary Degree (accessed 5 February 2008). Staffordshire University: Previous Honorary Awards (accessed 5 February 2008). Birmingham City University: Faculty of Law, Humanities, Development and Society: University honour for author Jenny Uglow (accessed 5 February 2008). In 2008, she was awarded the OBE for services to literature and publishing. In 2010, she succeeded Aeronwy Thomas as president of the Alliance of Literary Societies. The Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum: News (accessed 16 January 2013).
For Mr Lear, Uglow was awarded with the Hawthornden Prize in 2018.
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