Percy Lubbock Biography

British editor, biographer, and critic, born in London, educated at King's College, Cambridge. In 1906 he became librarian of the Pepys Library at Magadalene College, Cambridge, which supplied the materials for his biography of Samuel Pepys (1909). His editions of the The Middle Years, The Sense of the Past, and The Ivory Tower, the unfinished novels of his friend Henry James, appeared in 1917. He also edited The Letters of Henry James (two volumes, 1920) and the thirty-five volumes of James's Novels and Stories (1921–3). James's precepts concerning the structural principles of the novel are central to Lubbock's The Craft of Fiction (1920), his most influential critical work. Roman Pictures (1923), a humorously fictionalized account of an Englishman's visit to Rome, is more successful than his only novel, The Region Cloud (1925), a diffuse treatment of the artistic sensibility. Earlham (1922) and Shades of Eton (1929) are autobiographies of his early life. His other works include Elizabeth Barrett Browning in Her Letters (1906), an edition of the Diary of A. C. Benson (1926), and Portrait of Edith Wharton (1947), the most notable of his biographies.