Jennifer Sheila Uglow OBE (née Crowther, 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.
Books in order of publication:
Biographies and studies
George Eliot, Little, Brown Book Group Limited, 1987,
Elizabeth Gaskell: A Habit of Stories, Faber & Faber, 1993,
Henry Fielding Northcote House Publishers, Limited, 1995,
Hogarth: A Life and a World, Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1997, ebook edition. Faber & Faber. 2010.
Dr Johnson, His Club and Other Friends, National Portrait Gallery, 1998,
The Lunar Men: Five Friends Whose Curiosity Changed the World. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. 2002.
Palgrave Macmillan Dictionary of Women’s Biography (later editions with Maggy Hendry; 4th edn; 2005)
Nature’s Engraver: A Life of Thomas Bewick. Faber & Faber, Limited. 2006.
Words and Pictures: Writers, Artists and a Peculiarly British Tradition, Faber, 2008; Faber & Faber, 2011,
A Gambling Man: Charles II and the Restoration. Macmillan. 2010.
The Pinecone: The Story of Sarah Losh, Forgotten Romantic Heroine—Antiquarian, Architect, and Visionary. Faber & Faber. 2012.
In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793–1815, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015,
Mr. Lear: A Life of Art and Nonsense. London: Faber & Faber, Limited, 2017. First U.S. edition: New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2018.
Other nonfiction
A Little History of British Gardening – 2005
Oak Lawn Library Friends 