Janet Hobhouse Papers

Janet Hobhouse (1948-1991) was born in New York City, where she attended public and private schools, graduating from the Spence School in 1964. At the age of sixteen, she went to England, her father's home. After attending a school in Somerset, she read English at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, receiving her B.A. in 1969. Between 1970 and 1975, she lived in London, New York, and Paris. During this period, Ms. Hobhouse married the journalist Nicholas Fraser, who later wrote biographies of Aristotle Onassis and Eva Peron; the couple eventually separated.

In London, Janet Hobhouse worked as a book editor, and began to write on art for various magazines, including Studio International, Art in America, Art News, Arts Magazine, Connoisseur, and occasionally the New York Times. After 1975, she lived mostly in New York City. She became Contributing Editor of Art News in 1975, and from 1987 to 1988 was art critic for Newsweek.

Janet Hobhouse's first book, Everybody Who Was Anybody: A Biography of Gertrude Stein, was published in 1975, and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. According to one critic, she had "powers of sympathy so great that she seems to understand ... Stein's most difficult writing." She subsequently wrote three novels: Nellie Without Hugo (1982), Dancing in the Dark (1983), and November (1986). Dancing in the Dark, set in New York's gay community, was nominated for the Booker Prize, Britain's most prestigious literary award. Her novels have been compared to the work of Jane Austen and Henry James: they are finely-crafted studies in which the characters face moral choices in their attempts to find personal happiness. Ms. Hobhouse was particularly interested in the conflicts between freedom and security embodied in marriage.

Janet Hobhouse also wrote a non-fiction work, The Bride Stripped Bare: The Artist and the Female Nude in the 20th Century, published in 1988, which examines the lives and work ofthirteen male artists who painted or sculpted the female nude. Janet Hobhouse became a Fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities in 1986, and was awarded the Pergamon Press Fellowship in Literature in 1988, and residencies at the Millay Colony (1988), the Djerassi Foundation (1988), and Yaddo (1989). She was working on an autobiographical novel at the time of her early death from cancer in 1991. The novel, entitled The Furies, was published posthumously in 1993.

March 27, 1948

Janet Hobhouse is born Jean Konradin Hobhouse

1962

Janet's grandmother dies of cancer.

- 1964

Attends Spence School, New York City.

Summer 1966

Goes to England to visit father

1964-1966

Attends Bruton School for Girls, Sunny Hill, Somerset, England

1966-1969

Attends Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford; honors degree, English 1969

1968

Meets Nicholas Fraser (b. 1948) in Oxford

1969-1975

Lives in London

1972

Starts doing free lance writing about art.

1972-1973

Works as an editor at Barrie & Jenkins, publishers.

January 18, 1974

Marries Nicholas Fraser, journalist and author.

1974

Works at Seeker & Warbmg; gets seven months leave to write book about Gertrude Stein.

1975

Publishes Everybody Who Was Anybody. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, New York: Putnam

1976-1980

Lives in New York.

June 1979

Frances Hobhouse (b. 1925) commits suicide.

September 1980

Olga Lee commits suicide.

May 1981

Pam Hobhouse dies of cancer.

1981

Janet and Nick separate.

February 19, 1982

Janet's house in London is destroyed by fire.

1982

Nellie Without Hugo is published in London by Jonathan Cape and in New York by Viking.

October 1982

Possessions are stolen from Long Island City warehouse.

1983

Janet and Nick are divorced.

October 1983

Janet moves to New York City.

1983

Dancing in the Dark published in U.K. by Jonathan Cape; U.S. by Random House.

1984

Dancing in the Dark published in paperback by Random House as part of its "Vintage Contemporaries" series as well as in U.K. by Penguin.

1984-1985

Janet is ill with ovarian cancer.

1985

Publishes introduction to Gertrude Stein's Everybody's Autobiography (Virago)

1986

November. New York: Vintage. Everybody Who Was Anybody published in paperback by Arena (London).

1987

November published in London by Jonathan Cape.

1988

Publishes The Bride Stripped Bare. London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson.

1989

Everybody Who Was Anybody published in paperback by Doubleday's Anchor Books.

January 1990

Janet's illness returns.

January 1991

Janet Hobhouse dies in New York City.

1992

The Furies is published in London by Bloomsbury.

1993

The Furiesis published in New York by Doubleday; London by Touchstone.