# Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin (née Delavenay, born 20 June 1933) is an English biographer and literary editor. In 1976 she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. She won the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and several other awards.

## Quotes

* Boarding schools for girls were not hard to find in the 1780s, not least because keeping a school was one of the very few ways in which a woman could hope to earn a respectable living, but accounts of what went on in them make depressing, and sometimes horrifying, reading.
** Jane Austen: A Life. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 1999. p. 35. ISBN 0679766766. 1st part of quote last part of quote (1st edition 1997)
* ... The Diary is best known for his reporting of the national disasters that struck England while he was keeping it: the great plague of 1665, the great fire of London in 1666, the Dutch attack on the Medway in 1667. The record of these and other public events is used by historians and read with enjoyment by schoolchildren, because his reporter's eye was as keenly trained on them as it was on his private experience. What he was doing in such reporting was more significant than may appear at first glance, because the censorship imposed by the government of Charles II ensured that there no newspapers at this period except for a single government-controlled information sheet, the London Gazette. It meant that no proper record of public events was being kept, and even parliamentary debates were not allowed to be reported. ... As well as being a diarist, Pepys is regarded as one of the most important naval administrators in England's history. He rose to a position of eminence and power and was proud of his work in organizing, disciplining and developing the navy, and in insisting that shipbuilding must be properly funded. Those who most admire the administrator are sometimes ambivalent about the Diary.
** "Prologue". Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. 2007. pp. xxvii–xxxiii. ISBN 0-375-72553-9. (quote from p. xxx; 1st edition 2002)
* ... There was a great demand for engravings of his portrait, and his head was being modeled by an admiring sculptor. This was Dickens nearly halfway through his life: he was twenty-eight in February 1840, and had another thirty years ahead of him. He was living in a country that had been at peace for a quarter of a century. There had been no foreign wars, and no revolution at home, partly thanks to the Reform Bill of 1832, passed under the old King, William IV, in which parliamentary constituencies were redrawn and the electorate widened, cautiously. But the courts and alleys of London remained squalid with poverty, overcrowding and disease, and the rich in their great houses were unshaken Railways were changing the habits of the nation more than votes, and railway stations at Euston and Paddington already connected London to the north and the West Country.
** "Prologue: The Inimitable. 1840". Charles Dickens: A Life. New York: Penguin Press. 2011. ISBN 978-1-101-54799-1.
* With an English degree I found literary work, in publishing, mostly reading manuscripts, then in reviewing, occasional broadcasting and literary editing. Only in the early 1970s, as I approached forty, did I start working on my first historical biography, but I still had to earn my living by working as a literary editor. It was 1986 and I was in my mid-fifties before I could concentrate on full-time research and writing. I found great happiness in this work, and for the next twenty-five years I researched and wrote steadily. So at last I found my true vocation.
** "Introductory Note". A Life of My Own: A Memoir. New York: Penguin Press. 2018. ISBN 9780399562921. (1st edition 2017)

## Quotes about Claire Tomalin

* Tomalin herself examines the novels with the confident judgments of a critic, not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar. Appreciative of Hardy’s genius, she still finds his body of fiction “exceptionally uneven.” “Tess,” the novel that made him rich, remains by Tomalin’s measure an awkward production in spots, and yet it “glows with the intensity” of Hardy’s imagination.
** Thomas Mallon, (January 28, 2007)"Thomas Hardy's English Lessons (review of Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man by Claire Tomalin)". The New York Times.

## External links

* Encyclopedic article on Claire Tomalin on Wikipedia
* Claire Tomalin. The Guardian.