Review: John Guare on Hermione Lee’s Tom Stoppard, or The Secret Room (Part One)

Hermione Lee, who had captured the lives of Virginia Woolf, Edith Wharton, Willa Cather in revelatory detail, has chosen playwright Tom Stoppard as her next subject.

Or rather he chose her. In The Invention of Love, Tom Stoppard has the Oscar Wilde of his own making declare, “I took charge of my own myth.” Stoppard, who had derided biographies, asked th…