Not a 'writer with a capital W'

There is something winning about Jenny Uglow's insistence that she has always been "terribly lucky". The author of a string of hugely admired historical biographies, she still refuses to think of herself as "a writer with a capital ‘W'." A distinguished figure in publishing, known as "the best editor in London", she still expresses surprise that Chatto & Windus, where she is editorial director, tolerates her preference to work part-time.

Sitting in the kitchen of her house in Canterbury, almost her first remark is that she just lives an "ordinary family life". Later, in the course of remembering her student acting days, she wonders whether "that's why I like biography so much — because it's somehow easier being somebody else". But her capacity for self-effacement is matched by her friendliness and the enthusiasm she radiates when talking about her work. She isn't reflective about the writing process, she says; she is "much happier talking about the stuff".

Editor of stellar works

At Chatto, she has edited such stellar titles as A.S. Byatt's novels since Possession, Edmund White's Genet and Virginia Woolf and Edith Wharton by her close friend, Hermione Lee. Uglow describes herself as happily "plunged by editing into different worlds all the time".

Uglow's biographies span art, literature and science, and together they map a route of rigorous but evidently gleeful intellectual discovery. There are many connections, more or less obvious, between the works. Elizabeth Gaskell, for instance, a life of whom Uglow published in 1993, had family ties to Erasmus, Darwin and Josiah Wedgwood, who are at the centre of The Lunar Men, her account of the 18th-century Lunar Society.

Having immersed herself in 18th-century science, an obvious pathway was further back to the beginnings of the Royal Society, set up in 1660, the year Charles II returned to England to assume the throne. But curiosity got the better of Uglow once again and she became, she says, intrigued by the Restoration and by Charles II himself — his appetite for pleasure, his own interest in the "new science" and his often risky strategies for survival. "I have written about artists and writers, inventors and scientists," she says in the prologue to her new book about Charles, A Gambling Man, but "what if a person's art is also his life, his role simply ‘being the king'?"

In a related sense, too, A Gambling Man represents a departure for Uglow. "My books look as if they're on disparate subjects," she says, "but I realise after having written them that they're all about stroppy bourgeois radicals who were fighting the centre." And it is with these people that her sympathies lie. But "I began to wonder what things look like from the heart of power. And it's outrageous, of course, but it's also an amazing viewpoint".

All but one of Uglow's major books have been published by Faber, beginning with her life of Gaskell, whom she continues to admire as "a daring, pioneering writer, determined to speak out against injustice" and whose cause she was able to champion during the screening of the much-loved BBC adaptation of Cranford, in which she was involved as adviser. Her first job of this kind — going through scripts, checking for anachronisms and making suggestions — was on Tom Jones in 1997, "just after I'd written on Fielding. I just kept doing it for fun. A lot of my work has been on Andrew Davies adaptations. It can be maddening but I'm still fascinated by the difference between novel and film, the way dialogue works and the need to ‘see' scenes in every tiny detail." Her credits include the films of Pride and Prejudice, Bleak House, The Way We Live Now and Wives and Daughters.

It is Uglow's success in different spheres that is highlighted in friends' descriptions of her. "Everybody is aghast at what she's achieved," says Callil. "Jenny always struck me as amazingly busy, caring for her family, researching her books and holding down a packed job as an editor," Edmund White remembers. "She seems a bit scatterbrained or at least breathless but in fact her mind is beautifully organised — how else could she do so much? Hermione Lee once told me that when she would visit a new place with Jenny, within a matter of hours Jenny had sussed out the entire region, taken notes, absorbed everything: She is Henry James's ideal, the person on whom nothing is wasted."

It is certainly hard to think of a publisher at the top of the profession in Britain, now or in recent memory, who is as prolific and feted a writer. One of Uglow's secrets, perhaps, is that she long ago realised she didn't want to spend more than two days a week in an office. She describes herself as "not a natural nine-to-fiver. It's a very privileged thing to say, I know, but something about my programming doesn't fit that life."

It is at home in Canterbury that she works on her books. And if her mind slows, she goes outside and spends half an hour gardening, her passion for which, like her modesty, can be seen as one sort of thoroughgoing Englishness. "It is a misty November morning," she writes at the beginning of A Little History of British Gardening. "Each blade of grass gleams and leans, heavy with moisture, and the air is so still that leaves from the oak tree at the end of my garden fall straight down, twirling and landing like a whisper." It sounds better than the office to me.