Jenny Uglow

Jenny Uglow is a biographer and historian. Her award-winning books include The Lunar Men: The Friends Who Made the Future, and In These Times: Living in Britain through Napoleon’s Wars. She is particularly interested in the relation of word and image, and she has written on several writers, artists and engravers, including William Hogarth, Thomas Bewick and Walter Crane.

Her book, Mr Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense, won the Hawthornden Prize for 2018. Her latest title, Sybil and Cyril: Cutting Through Time, was published in November 2021. She lives in Canterbury and Borrowdale and has four grown up children and seven grandchildren.

Who were your literary heroes as you were growing up and when did you first start writing?

I read lots of Greek and Norse myths, and then I loved Georgette Heyer and books like Marryat’s Children of the New Forest, before moving on to George Eliot and Jane Austen, and science fiction. Quite a muddle.

I wrote a ‘novel’ of about 8 pages when I was eight, but didn't really begin writing seriously until I was in my 30s

How did you first become interested in the story of Cyril Power and Sybil Andrews?

I grew up with two prints that were given to my parents, Power’s The Eight and Sybil Andrews’ Bringing in the Boat. Recently I realised I knew very little about these artists, and when I looked, I thought their story was fascinating.

Was there much of a paper trail to follow to help your research?

All their letters have disappeared, so I had to trace their lives through a stack of Power’s sketchbooks and drawings, in a London gallery, and then through Sybil Andrews’ appointment diaries and papers and print-books in the Glenbow Museum in Calgary.

Was there anything you found out that surprised you?

Yes, one surprise: it seemed obvious that they were lovers as they were together for twenty years, but Sybil adamantly denied this, and there is no evidence to prove it either way.

Sybil is a bit of a local hero here in Suffolk with a local academy named after her. What do you think is her enduring legacy?

She always said that her heart was in Suffolk, even in her later life in British Columbia. Her legacy is in her art, but also in her spirit – imaginative, determined, immensely hard-working and full of the enjoyment of life – her favourite words were ‘exciting’ and ‘fun’.

Is there anything you can share with us about your latest project and how much planning goes into a new subject?

The book about Sybil Andrews and Cyril Power is really my ‘latest project’. It certainly needed careful planning, and a lot of thought about how to move between writing about the life and the art, and the ideas behind it.

Since writing this I have been working on a book with Quentin Blake, to celebrate his ninetieth birthday next year. There, the planning was how to integrate as many pictures as possible into the text, and how to follow all aspects of his career.

One book or author that everyone should read?

Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. It has everything - history, emotion, ideas, and is vividly alive and readable.

If there are any future biographers reading this what qualities do you think are needed to be successful in this field?

There are many different forms of ‘life-writing’ , but above all I think a biographer needs to be passionately interested in the subject, yet detached enough to see the flaws and write honestly about them. That can be quite hard!