Claire Tomalin (born Claire Delavenay on 20 June 1933) is an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Read full biography of Claire Tomalin →
Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
You become more tolerant when you become older. You're not interested in rapping people over the knuckles; you're interested in understanding... →
Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written... →
Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.
Essentially, I spent most of my childhood with my mother and my older sister, and I suppose I had rather a romantic vision of how things might be if... →
I had forgotten until I looked up old notes that I sold the film rights of my first book, a life of Mary Wollstonecraft: there was a lunch, a... →
I have been fascinated by Dickens worshippers who strenuously deny that he did anything wrong in relation to his wife, even though the record is... →
I thought it was a glorious thing to be a critic and to be a literary editor, and one was really doing something that mattered: to keep up standards... →
I was working at the 'Evening Standard' when I heard that there was a job going as deputy literary editor on the 'New Statesman.' I... →
I've behaved badly in my life. I hope I haven't behaved as badly as Dickens! In a way, if you're a woman, you're not in a position to... →
If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full... →
In 2007, several musicologists contacted me at about the same time, expressing interest in the work of the mysterious Muriel Herbert, a few of whose... →
Claire Tomalin (born Claire Delavenay on 20 June 1933) is an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft.