My Favourite Biographer: Claire Tomalin

My favourite living biographer is Claire Tomalin, whose books about great writers have instructed and delighted me over the years.

Claire (born 1933 in London, with an English mother and a French father) worked as a journalist before turning her hand to biographies and even a memoir of her own life. Her first book appeared in 1974, The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft. That has been followed up with many award-winning biographies, including Shelley and his World (1980), Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life (1987), The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990), Mrs Jordan’s Profession (the story of actress Dorothea Jordan and her royal lover, published in 1994), Jane Austen: A Life (1997), Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self (2002), Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man (2006), Charles Dickens: A Life (2011) and The Young H.G. Wells: Changing the World (2021). Her memoir, A Life of my Own, came out in 2017 and was deeply moving, especially when she wrote of the suicide of her daughter Susanna.

I love Claire Tomalin’s style as a biographer. She mixes all the needed facts and information, with analysis of what makes that author great, all in an easy-to-read way that keeps you gripped from the first page to the last. In her book about Thomas Hardy, she was particularly good at weaving in Hardy’s poems, showing how they illuminate what was happening in his life at the time. She includes pictures and maps, full bibliographies and is a meticulous scholar in all her writing.

I once had the very great pleasure of meeting Claire. She came to Australia and I persuaded her to come and give a talk to the Jane Austen Society of Australia. After the meeting, I got to drive her back to her hotel in the city and I’ll never forget that precious half hour in the car. I wanted to drive via Brisbane so we could just keep talking. Of course, we discussed Jane Austen and the talk she had just given, but she was at the time working on her Pepys biography and I loved hearing what she had to say about my favourite diarist. I was intrigued when she told me that she always tries to walk in the footsteps of whichever author whose life she is writing – she said it was essential to see the places they saw, experience the landscapes that inspired them, and get a good idea of how much time they spent wearing out shoe leather.

Claire was kind enough to write words of high praise about my book, Jane Austen and Crime, and we have kept some contact over the years. She is now in her 90s, but I hope she is keeping busy with another book, and staying healthy. She has set new standards in biography and has done so much to enrich our knowledge of classic authors.

If you have yet to read any of Claire Tomalin’s biographies, you have such a treat in store.