Hello and welcome to Pivot Points. This is the podcast about the pivotal moments that have shaped our academic,
professional and personal lives and some Kayo, head of communications at Wolfson College.
And I'm all about creating ways for you to share your stories like this podcast.
This episode is a conversation with Hominy Lee, who was Wilson's president from 2008 to 2017 as Tim's predecessor, as a writer of biographies.
She's naturally very curious about people, so would obviously rather be in my shoes as the interviewer.
And we're very lucky that she was brave enough to step into another role as the interviewee.
Thank you very much for coming in and being on the podcast.
One thing I have to say is that I, I don't think I've ever known a head of a former head of an institution or a former boss or someone
in that capacity with such a consistently positive reputation from everybody that I speak in.
So how does it feel for you now coming out of Hollywood? Yes, we are recording.
This is lovely. Well, that's very nice of you to say.
I'm sure that if you had picked your your, you know, people more carefully, you might have found something to promote.
It's it's very nice coming back, I think.
I regard this job and I think a lot of other people who do this kind of job think the same as a kind of relay race.
I was actually at school always terribly, terribly bad in relay races at passing the baton.
I would always be the person that dropped the baton, failed to pick up the baton.
So I, you know, would have liked wanted to come become this or that.
And so it's very nice to have passed the baton and to see different concerns coming up with the next head of house,
but also some of the same old issues coming around clearly.
And it but it's a great pleasure to see a college which you've put nine years of your life into as your last, you know, fully paid up job.
Very nice to see it in such good hands and and going forward in such an imaginative and enterprising way.
So it's nothing but a pleasure to come back.
And it's a particular pleasure because you can come back and eat and drink and be married and not have to have to work.
Exactly. Right. Yeah. Nine years is a very long time. It is a long time.
And I suppose my my follow up question from that really is that you you obviously have a long history with Oxford.
And that brings me to your first pivot point of deciding to come here at the age of 17.
Yes. So let's start with that and then work forward from that.
So, yes. One of the pivot points I've chosen is a very, very vivid memory of coming to Oxford in October 1965 and coming to Hilda's.
And I came up quite young because I had taken the then Oxford entrance exam when I was 16, and so I came out when I was 17 and I had had a very.
Privileged, bookish musical, middle class London childhood.
His daughter. An adopted daughter and.
I had been quite a stay at home. I hadn't been a very adventurous, runaway kind of child.
I had not actually lived away from home before.
So the moment of getting out of the car and walking away from the car down to kind of race towards the gates of St Kilda was
actually a tremendously important moment for me and I remember making an internal decision that I wasn't going to turn round.
And this sort of ludicrous, self-appointed moment of this is where my independence starts.
I'm sure my poor parents were sitting in the cockpit. She's not giving us away.
And I remember feeling my legs trembling. I'm thinking, I'm not going to turn around.
I'm now going to be an independent adult.
Actually, of course, that is one of the most important things about going to university at whatever age, really.
But especially when you go in your teens, which is whatever you learn, you are going to learn to be an independent adult.
You're going to make your own ghastly mistakes and you're going to make your own choices.
And I went cushioned in those years by the fact that, you know, since well, since after World War Two, the government,
through the local education authorities, had paid students fees and had provided maintenance grants and all that was swept away in the in the 1990s.
And I also had very strong parental support, so I could afford to go to university away from my hometown, for instance, which many students can't do.
And I was cushioned in that way, which I, looking back on, I think, offers an era of extraordinary privilege and good luck and good fortune.
At the time, I took it completely for granted.
I don't think I ever thought about it. I simply regarded it as my life and this is what I was going to do.
And I had an exhibition to sell does, and I was very proud of that.
And I was kind of a 17 year old girl and I was going to have a wonderful time.
And on the whole, I did. I never thought about the money. And looking back now,
I suppose one of the moral lessons that I give to myself is not to not to take things for granted and to be aware of your good fortune,
to be aware of your opportunities. And I know I talk to my my husband's grandchildren, for instance, and who in their teens, in their twenties.
And this generation of people of that age seem to be far more aware of the political and social basis on which they're living their lives far,
far more than I was and many of my generation were.
So that's that's been a big change in many ways.
And then I walked into St Hilda's. And the first thing,
pretty much the first thing that happened in that freshers week was that I met six other girls and I think on the first
day they were all very different and we remained friends for the whole of the three years we were a sort of group.
And that that solidarity of female friendship, which was actually a very important part of the Single Sex College to go,
I'm sure it continues, was incredibly important to me.
And I actually I mean, they met various different destinies, some of them rather sad.
But, um, and I lost touch actually with, with most of them.
But just last week I went to a memorial event at St Cross College and for the previous Masters and Cross rep,
and his widow was one of those girls that I had met in 1965.
And it was it was a sad occasion, but it was also very wonderful to have that reunion.
57 years after I'd first met her and to think of those lives all going on.
So, yes, so that female solidarity was a tremendously important thing in my life and did change my life, actually.
And. Would probably lead me on to my next pivot point.
Yes. And what did you struggle with at that time? Why?
I want you to be. Tremendously popular, tremendously active.
Have a finger in every pie. I wasn't interested in politics and I wasn't interested in sport.
Those were totally close books to me that I was very interested in journalism and I was very interested in theatre and I wanted to make my mark,
I think, and at the same time I wanted to do very well by my tutors.
I had a remarkable set of tutors of that generation of rather fierce, very independent women tutors who seemed to be incredibly old at the time.
They were probably in their thirties. Can you pick one and describe?
Oh, it was a splendid lady called Ann Eliot, who left a very strong mark on all her students.
And she was beautiful, too.
She had a bone and clean, very plain, severe clothes, and she was extremely quiet.
And she was a great Spenser scholar. And I was I couldn't make heads or tails, so that was just a foolish risk.
But she had this habit of you would say something you thought was absolutely brilliant in your tutorial,
and there would be a gigantic pause, tremendous silence while you heard your remarks falling flat.
And then after a very long time, she would make a somewhat quizzical comment.
And I always wanted to be able to teach her, and of course I never did. So I took all the time.
But she you know, she was very remarkable. And she was she was very austere.
And she there was something a bit non like about her.
And I tremendously wanted her respect and admiration at the same time I went to school for an act in place.
And so I think one of the problems was,
was that and the other was a sort of the usual kind of crazy emotional seesaw that most teenagers have when they go up to university,
and suddenly they're surrounded by all kinds of people trying to influence them in all kinds of ways.
And of course, in those days, there were far fewer women at Oxford than there were men.
So we had a great time. Yeah, course. At the same time, it was all quite hectic.
Yes. You mentioned something else. Yes.
I'm also interested in what impact your Oxford experience, as in the label of having come to Oxford has on your identity?
Because I think that's something that comes up in my conversations here in the college just and in the university as a whole,
this idea of the reputation that going to Oxford carries.
Yes. I think it's a good and bad reputation, actually.
I mean, there is still and I think in some ways, probably rightly so, an aura of.
Privilege. Around the Oxford experience.
And we've all, all of us involved in Oxford teaching and Oxford Life and Oxford Administration are all,
you know, have been and are working hard to to change that.
But I think it's still there. And I and it doesn't always serve you in good stead.
You know, people who apply for jobs to other universities can sometimes find that their Oxford degree
is not necessarily their best passport and that the potential employers will be thinking,
oh, well, they were at Oxford, and so they won't understand the system in this in this university that does that does, I think happen.
On the other hand, of course, you have the astonishing luxuries of the intellectual life here.
You know, in my case, principally the library, which is not like anywhere else in the world, really.
And to have had that library for three years in one's life, indeed, in my case, for five years, because I went on and did a single.
So it's it's both, of course, enormously important and advantageous.
And in some ways, it's it's not exactly a shackle, but it's an identifying mark, which doesn't always work to the good.
In my case, it was, you know, crucially important to me that I left Oxford after my undergraduate and graduate
years and spent 31 years teaching in other institutions and then came back in 98.
So it's it's been of the utmost importance for me to have those years in America and Liverpool and University, which had nothing to do with Oxford.
Yeah. How did you then feel after completing your degrees in Oxford?
How did you feel about yourself and where you wanted to go in life? I didn't want to leave when I finished my undergraduate degree in.
I got it first and I was being encouraged to stay on.
I remember very vividly in my last year having a choice between playing Masha in the production of Three Sisters and working for a first.
And I chose working for a first. And I was like, This is a part of me that wanted to go into the theatre world.
I appeased that longing by writing a book about Tom Stoppard.
It's okay. And then after I'd done a two year B film, I decided not to do a DPHIL.
I wanted to get on.
I wanted to earn my living. So I got a fellowship in this in the States in 1970.
My first teaching job. So my first teaching job was when I was 22.
So I did start very young in my profession and have gone on ever since until I retired from the college in 2017.
So it's been a long, a long haul in academic life.
And looking back, I kind of wish I'd taken a break or done other things maybe for a couple of years,
but what do you think you've learnt from just going straight into that?
I was very eager to carry on the kinds of conversations I've been having as a student, but with others,
with students that I could teach, you know, to about my literary, you know, what I knew?
I was very, very keen to. Pass on.
This knowledge and thinking. And, uh, and yeah, I was, I was keen to write.
Um, and keen to have a regular employment which would allow me to write books as well.
Well, that quite nicely. Brings me on to your second pivot point, that of agreeing to write a biography of Virginia Woolf in 1989.
How did that come about? Was that something that you were always interested in? I've been in academics since 1970, and I was then in the eighties.
I was at the University of York and I'd done a lot of reviewing,
and I had a television books programme on Channel four for quite a bit of time during the eighties,
and I'd written four books by then, one of which was a critical book on on Virginia Woolf, and these were literary critical books.
And I was asked in fact, I was asked twice.
I was asked by a publisher, HRH or something like that to write a new biography of Virginia Woolf that had been the big standard,
well-loved biography by her nephew, Quentin Bell, which was the kind of.
That was the sort of mark for Virginia Woolf studies. And I said, No, I thought it was a ridiculous idea.
There were 100 books on Virginia Woolf, and I couldn't see any point in doing this again.
Why do you think they asked you? Well, then you noticed again by a person who's had a lot of influence on my life,
a very remarkable person called Carmen Carlisle, who had been the founder and editor of Virago Press.
And I've done some work for her.
And she was then the director of Chatto and Windus, who ever since then had been my main publisher and come and asked me to do this.
And I thought, well, if to lots of people think it's time for a new Life of Virginia Woolf and if to lots of people think that I could do it.
And if Carmen in particular, who's an astonishing force of energy and creativity and decisiveness,
willpower and feminist enterprise, I think that it should be me then I should say yes.
But why did they think it should be? I don't know.
I suppose they thought I was interested in Virginia Woolf and I could write and that I might be able to write a biography.
I mean, the I think the two you know, there's two things about this that I look back on is that.
Of people often say to me, How do you learn to be a biographer?
Hmm. And of course, you did learn to be a biographer. You learn by doing it.
And that is the case with most jobs. I mean, I take it that's what you're doing now in this job.
You learn by doing it. You don't know whether you can do it till you leave, till you are doing it.
So there was that. I think I was also rather out of tune with what was happening in English studies in the 1980s.
I think I was rather out of tune with critical theory and with deconstruction and with the French based theories of the death of the author.
And I found it becoming increasingly alien to me, actually.
And so writing a life of a writer in whose life I was very interested in, which was a difficult life to write because it was very contested.
And it is usually people have very strong feelings, pro and con.
Virginia Woolf was it was exactly the kind of challenge I wanted and maybe Common recognise that this would work for me.
So I think it's, I think, as it were, the moral of the story that I tell myself is being willing to jump and take on.
You know what to me was a big challenge. I mean, we're not talking about, you know, running the country or climbing a mountain.
This is a quiet life we're talking about.
But nonetheless, these are big these are big challenges within one's own life.
And that was a massive I had a lot of apprehension and a lot of fear.
I was scared of not being able to do it. I was scared of not being intelligent enough for them.
And I was scared of not finding my way into into the right shape for the book because she herself was so deeply critical of conventions,
of biography and constantly writing about how the conventional biography simply escape to the surface.
And you never get to the heart of the person. And I wanted to try and find a way of doing it that I thought would.
So I kind of reinvented the form of biography a little bit in my in my own way.
This is now a very common thing to do, but it wasn't a sort of standard cradle to grave operation, as it were.
So I think.
I think looking back, it was about taking being willing to jump and try something new and also taking the opportunities that come your way.
Most of the big decisions, pivot points in my life actually have come at me rather than me going for them.
And it's a curious thing and I sort of look back on this and think, you know, I should have made more decisions.
The decisions, I suppose, have been knowing when to take your chance, knowing when to take your opportunity because they don't come around again.
Yeah. And in what way did writing that biography either confirm or change your identity as a woman?
Deeply changed my identity as a as a woman, as a writer, as an academic, as a professional person in my in my field.
Because. It made me think about.
A great woman's life very, very hard, very carefully.
And I was, as it were, re-evaluating it in the sense that anyone who writes a big biography of a major figure who is a sort
of contested figure is always going to be writing it from the point of view of their their education,
their race, their nationality, their gender.
You know, you bring to it what you are, but you also change by encountering that life.
And it made me think about. The terrible battle that she had between.
Ferocious creative commitment to doing what she wanted to do.
Knew she needed to do. And terrible problems with physical and mental illness.
And just thinking about that battle was, to me, very energising, actually.
Mean, you know, I think it's a heroic story, actually. And maybe there's something in me that likes heroes.
Yeah, I think I always have liked heroes and wanted to create.
It is not as a sentimental story, but as a heroic story.
So all of that was very important. And then in professional terms, it opened a lot of doors to me.
And it was a it was it was well received when it came out in 96.
And I think out of that came my appointment as Goldsmiths Chair New College here in 1998.
So it had a very powerful effect on my or my life and then I kind of turned me into a biographer rather than principally a literary critic.
Yeah. And in what way do you think your academic interests changed as you changed throughout your career?
Well, I think I. I don't know quite how to answer that.
I mean, I've had a I've had a long interest in American literature, and my first job was in America.
And I've written a lot about American writers, including Philip Roth and Willa Cather.
And I did a big biography of Edith Wharton.
And that kept pace with my teaching of American literature.
So I suppose as I developed more and more interest in that, that became part of my my writing life as well.
I was thinking, of course, as anybody who ever met the Queen has thought over the last few days about them, you know,
their encounter with the queen and I, I was I got a gong and I went to the palace to get my gong and the queen gave me my government.
She asked me a question and I had been wondering what she was going to ask me.
And she has a gentleman, you know, on her standing on her left who mutters in her ear the name and the job of the person she's about.
Yes, not exactly annoyance, but, you know. Yeah. And she said to me, tell me, how do you combine your writing with your teaching?
And I thought, this is an absolutely brilliant question, and I wonder if she's got half.
And I suspect she could have been a journalist.
Exactly. And so how do you combine your writing with your teaching has been, of course, as it is for so many academics.
The key question and the answer I gave her at the time and looking back, so yeah, I kind of stand by that was they feed into each other.
Hmm. And so I suppose you asked me about how writing that book and writing other books have kept pace with my academic life.
I suppose they have kept pace with the things that I am interested in, but also the writing has not necessarily been tied to the teaching.
So, for instance, I wrote a life of an English novelist called Penelope Fitzgerald, who I think is a genius.
And that that also came at me. The family came and asked me if I would do it, and I said yes,
but that's not somebody I would have been teaching because she's not on any reading list.
So it doesn't always keep pace. Yeah. So do you.
Seeing other people as heroes reminds me of a lovely anecdote that I have from a Wilson alumnus,
Shaharzad Akbar, who I interviewed for Plans and Prospects this summer.
And she said she was obviously here under your presidency, and she said that she essentially worshipped you and the youth.
Yeah, that was the same impression I came away with.
And the reason she worshipped you was that she really saw you was such an incredible example of female leadership.
And I'm wondering if those if if that as a role came naturally to you and how much you took from other people who use or is your heroes?
I I'm very touched and moved to hear about that from Shahzad.
In fact, Shahzad gave me the idea for this is not unlike pivot points for something I set up, but also while I was here, which was a life stories day.
So, so many people in this college from all over the world.
And you've only got to sit down next to them at lunch for 5 minutes, you know, and I always used to go and have lunch with the students.
And I was when I was here and I would just listen to their what they had to tell me, really.
And she said that when she'd been at Smith, they'd have this day where people told that story in some form.
It could be a dance or a poem, music or an anecdote for 4 minutes.
And I would just came out. And so I stole that idea.
And so yes. And of course, Shahzad's career is just absolutely extraordinary.
She's a role model for many, many people. Yes.
And I'm terribly glad that she's attached to that. Going to be attached to the college.
It's marvellous for us. And yes, I suppose for my own life, much less dramatically when I got the when I was appointed as the Goldsmith's chair in 98.
One of the pleasures of that for me was that I was the first woman to take that chair.
And since then, my successor was the late Laura marcus, who's very much mourned and very much missed.
But it was wonderful for me that she took that battle over from me.
And similarly, when I came here in 2008, having done that job for ten years, I was the first woman who'd been appointed to be President Wilson.
And at that time, although things I'm glad to say have rapidly changed over the last 15 years or so,
and I work that many women heads of houses in Oxford.
I mean, I think there were six of us or eight of us out of whatever, just thirtysomething.
And so that's changed a lot, I think is now half and half.
Yeah, which is great. But I, yeah, I felt like a bit of a pioneer.
And one of my great friends and role models in that was Margaret Macmillan,
who was then head of St News and who was also, like me, combining writing books whilst running a college.
And how do you feel Wilson has changed since then.
I, I think that what I needed to do when I came to Wilson and this is my third pivot point, which is the moment when I decided to accept the,
the job here, which was not an entirely easy decision because I did, after all, have this very fine chair.
And had I been a named chair at Cambridge, I could have kept my name chair and run the college.
But the Oxford system is very different, I think,
because Oxford asks much more of its heads of houses perhaps in terms of sort of it being a full time job.
I would have liked to do both. Yeah. And that was so.
So giving that up was sort of unheard of. I mean, people didn't give up the Goldsmiths chair and there were I was aware that there was a lot of.
Some astonishment and some amazement that I had done this,
that I had given up a very prestigious academic post in order to run a college and not a grand old Oxford College, which, you know, ever changing.
Relatively young, very on Oxford e kind of college in many ways.
So I was aware that I was creating ripples. That's not why I did it.
But I could see that that was a side effect. And I could see also that.
Wilson. Could change, you know, that it's that its character needed to be cherished and kept going.
And enriched all the time. But there were things it could do that it didn't already have.
Like an auditorium. Hmm. Like a cafe.
Like an extension to the library. Like the academic clusters.
I mean, there were. There was lots of work going on, particularly in the classical and linguistics area.
But there were all kinds of energies that could be channelled.
And so I think what I and this may have changed things a bit.
I think I think what I tried to do was to ask everybody on the governing body.
Who could, too, to switch a little percentage of what they were doing more towards the college,
you know, to just wrangle some of what they were doing so that it took a college woods direction.
And to make the most of the remarkable fact that you have all these different interests and different specialisms and different forms of scholarship,
and to make those intermingle perhaps a bit more than they had been before,
I don't think there had been a huge amount going on in that direction before I arrived.
So I think it was a sort of expanding of the plant and and.
Invigorating, perhaps, or enlivening of what was actually going on inside the college.
Hmm. And then. I.
You aren't yourself aware of being a role model or a hero, and you would be a ridiculous person if you thought of yourself in those terms.
But I suppose the fact that I was the first woman that I that I did sort of commit to the job,
I did spend a lot of time in the college in that I did sort of turn up and have lunch with people,
students, I mean,
and had a lot of inter-relationship with the students in terms of creating their life stories day and the President's seminars and things like that.
I suppose that was well looked on. Yeah, I think that was I think that made people feel cheerful.
Yeah. And what do you think?
What do you think it was about your personality, you as family, that brought those things to this role and have that impact?
I find it embarrassing to talk about myself in that self analytical way,
which is why I'm not going to write an autobiography and why I'm really hoping that the biography you write.
What about you? But I suppose.
I'm interested in other people. Yes. I mean, I want to know what they're doing and I want to know what's going to happen to them.
And I want to know why they're doing what they're doing. And so I suppose it's partly just general nosiness.
So is it deeply uncomfortable for you to be the one being to these horrible fires?
I'm also wondering that and so we've talked we've talked about people who, for you, felt like heroes and people that you worshipped in the past.
Who is there somebody in your life like that now? My, how you lived through that was lovely.
I never. I never finished the story of coming to Wolfson, actually.
Hmm. So, talking of heroes, one of the people who led me into the main person, actually, who led me into Wilson was a colleague of mine named Shorty,
who was the poet John Storey,
who had been who was then acting president after the death of the previous president and who had been acting president before.
And I knew him very well. And he and I had no.
Intention or desire of becoming a head of house. I had been approached before and I thought, No, this is not at all what I want to do.
I had done ten years as Goldsmiths Chair.
I was turning 60. And I was very intrigued by the thought that.
I could do a different job in my sixties.
I liked the idea of trying to do something that I didn't know I could do at that period of my life,
because I knew that I could perfectly well go on doing all the things I could do
teaching and writing and giving papers at conferences and all the rest of it.
And that would perfectly well last me till what was what due to be my retirement age, which was 67 then.
And so coming to the college would give me a little more lease of life as well, because I actually didn't have to.
I mean, I chose to retire after nine years, partly because I was in the middle of a big book I wanted to finish.
And also because I thought. There's a point where you feel, okay, someone needs to come in and freshen this up now.
You know it's time to pass the baton. Yes.
So you just feel that yourself and you kind of you kind of begin to get the feeling that, you know, you want to quit while you're ahead.
You don't want people to be asking you if they want if you'd like to spend more time with your family.
And there's just a moment where it starts to feel a little bit repetitive.
You think, okay, I'm back on this annual cycle. Now we do this, now we do this, and it isn't.
And also, you've done the kind of. The group of key things that you wanted to do, which was in my case, you know,
fundraise to get this building built and also be very involved with the design of this building, which was a very exciting thing for me.
I'd never worked with architects before. And so, yes, so I decided to, to, to go after nine years.
But when I started, I really liked the thought that I would be learning to do things.
That I had no idea how to do. I mean, I you know, I'd done some big administrative jobs, but I hadn't run an institution before.
And it was a very exciting thing to do.
And you learnt that you were going to do things like fundraising, which I hadn't done so much of before in my life, and that,
you know, obviously you have a the first thing I did was to appoint a development director, which I hadn't been here.
Mm hmm. And, you know, we worked very well together, and that went very well.
But it's it's not something. Again, it's something you learn how to do by doing.
Yes. Yeah. And what's next for you?
Oh, I'm just in the early stages of my next book, which is a life of the art historian and novelist Anita Brookner.
And I'm deeply buried in all her writings at the moment, and I've given myself a very nice,
easy, long deadline for what is going to be a relatively short book for me,
because I thought, well, not more than 300 pages, as opposed to the last one, which weighed considerably more than was a big life of Tom Stoppard.
Although I had the opportunity to work with him and I thought, Well, it's a big life and I might as well do the whole thing.
It was a great big book and it was a lot of work and it took me six years.
Yeah. And it came out during lockdown. Yeah.
But so I'm taking life a little bit easier, but I'm still writing.
That's great. Well, I hope this one takes you considerably shorter length of time in six years.
Thank you so much for coming. A great pleasure. Thank you for all the good questions.