Let's make this birthday one to remember.

77 years old (Born on February 29, 1948)

Happy Birthday, Hermione Lee! May your day be filled with more literary delights than Virginia Woolf's diary entries and fewer plot twists than a Philip Roth novel. Your brilliant insights into the lives of great writers have illuminated countless classrooms—though we're still waiting for you to reveal how Eudora Welty managed such perfect prose without spellcheck.

From Oxford lecture halls to Wolfson College corridors, you've gracefully navigated academia’s labyrinthine plots better than most protagonists in classic literature. Here's hoping this year brings even greater chapters (and perhaps fewer footnotes). Cheers to another timeless edition of Professor Lee: scholarly yet delightfully readable!