A Life of My Own

A Sunday Times Top 10 Bestseller 
 
In this remarkable memoir of love, loss and literature, acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin turns her eye to another fascinating literary life: her own. She tells of a wartime childhood, Cambridge friendships and an early marriage to a brilliant journalist. After his sudden death in a war zone, Claire is left to raise their four children alone - all while leading a trail-blazing career in literary London. 
 
A Life of My Own is the tale of a woman overcoming obstacles both rare and routine to live not only a good but also a meaningful life. 
 
'A dramatic and absorbing survivor's tale' Hilary Spurling, Spectator 
 
'Unexpectedly moving. Tomalin's story filled me with a kind of awe. Every page is valiant, every paragraph full of pluck' Rachel Cooke, New Statesman 
 
'She has been tested in ways few women are. This memoir is a triumph' Valerie Grove, Literary Review

You will find it hard not to be amazed and impossible not to be moved by the indomitable spirit which drives this memoir...She comes across like the heroine of a great novel...a hugely entertaining book

Absorbing, moving and marvellously written

Her memoir is peppered with fascinating pen portraits and anecdotes... she has tried, as Pepys did in his life, to give the 'texture' of a life. This she has achieved quite brilliantly

She should be a heroine to modern snowflakes who melt at the first hurdle. Tomalin is like a glacier: unstoppable, inexorable, gathering resolve as she goes... The book is poised and beautifully paced

I loved Claire Tomalin's memoir and ate through it in a day when I was supposed to be doing other things. So interesting and delightful and charming. I loved how she weaves the big dramatic events with the everyday - which is so much of what life is.

Cathy Rentzenbrink, bestselling author of The Last Act of Love

She has been tested in ways few women are. Her ability to overcome adversity may seem discreetly, even austerely handled, but for Claire Tomalin this memoir is another triumph

It is not Tomalin's professional life that impresses most in this memoir but her survival through personal tragedy, or rather , her remarkable ability to articulate its bleakness... She speaks from the heart but retains a sort of privacy, and is all the more powerful for it

As well as her adventures in literary London as a hack, we also see a private life of contentment and heartbreak

There is a truth to every chapter of her recollection

As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin had written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life

In this triumph of clear sightedness, Tomalin turns her biographers searchlight on herself

Claire Tomalin is a former Literary Editor at the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven highly acclaimed literary biographies, including Samuel Pepys, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and in 2011 the international bestseller Charles Dickens. She is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life. 
 
 This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin. When he was killed on assignment as a war correspondent she was left to bring up their four children - and at the same time make her own career. 
 
 She writes of the intense joys of a fascinating progression as she became one of the most successful literary editors in London before discovering her true vocation as a biographer, alongside overwhelming grief at the loss of a child. 
 
 Writing with the élan and insight which characterize her biographies, Claire Tomalin sets her own life in a wider cultural and political context, vividly and frankly portraying the social pressures on a woman in the Fifties and Sixties, and showing 'how it was for a European girl growing up in mid-twentieth-century England ... carried along by conflicting desires to have children and a worthwhile working life.'

A Life

Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens is the acclaimed definitive biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin 
 
Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more. 
 
At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey.Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. 
 
From the award-winning author of Samuel Pepys, Charles Dickens: A Life paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. If you loved Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol, this book is invaluable reading. 
 
'By far the most humane and imaginatively sympathetic account yet for the general reader' Amanda Craig, New Statesman

Claire Tomalin is the author of seven highly acclaimed biographies, including Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which was the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year. Her previous book on Dickens, The Invisible Woman, an account of his relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan, won three major literary prizes. A former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, she is married to the playright and novelist Michael Frayn.

Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonically hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more. 
 
Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

A Secret Life

Katherine Mansfield

Katherine Mansfield is the celebrated biography be bestselling author Claire Tomalin 
 
'One of the best biographies I have ever read: a perfect match of author and subject. It should become a classic' Alison Lurie 
 
Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies on her heels; but when she died aged only thirty-four she became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings us nearer than we have ever been to this courageous, greatly gifted, haunted and haunting writer. 
 
'Generous, dispassionate, even-handed, setting out probably as plainly as anyone ever will Katherine's high hopes, the odds she faced and the impossible obstacles that ditched her in the end' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph 
 
'Provides the finest and most subtly shaded portrait so far' John Gross, New York Times 
 
From the acclaimed author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, this virtuoso biography is invaluable reading for lovers of Katherine Mansfield everywhere. 
 
Claire Tomalin is the award-winning author of eight highly acclaimed biographies, including: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens; Mrs Jordan's Profession; Jane Austen: A Life; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self; Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man and, most recently, Charles Dickens: A Life. A former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, she is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

Claire Tomalin has been literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven highly acclaimed literary biographies including Samuel Pepys, which won the Whitbread Book of the Year award, and the international bestseller Charles Dickens. She is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies at her heels. Dying at the age of only 34, she became posthumously one of the most influential writers of the last century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of DH Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings her nearer than we have ever been to this haunted and hauting writer.

The Time-torn Man

Thomas Hardy

The seminal biography of a great poet, novelist and sacred figure in English writing, Thomas Hardy, from bestselling author Clare Tomalin. 
 
 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday 
 
 Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats. 
 
 In the hands of Whitbread Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin, author of the bestselling Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, Thomas Hardy comes vividly alive. 
 
 'Another triumph for a biographer who goes from strength to strength' Melvyn Bragg, Guardian, Books of the Year 
 
 'Tomalin provides an object lesson in how to write a life' Economist 
 
 'A moving story, and Tomalin tells it vividly, with as great a fund of sympathy and sense, as can be imagined' Daily Telegraph 
 
 'Skilful and absorbing, admirable. The most compelling of life stories' Daily Telegraph 
 
 'Hardy emerges as a man full of spirit and gaiety' Sunday Times

Claire Tomalin is a former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven highly acclaimed literary biographies, all available in Penguin, and has won many prizes, including the Whitbread Book of the Year for Samuel Pepys. She is married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twenieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband but a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats. In the hands of Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come intensely alive.

The Unequalled Self

Samuel Pepys

From the acclaimed author of Charles Dickens: A Life comes a celebrated biography that casts new light on the remarkable diaries of Samuel Pepys. 
 
Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, a figure of substance. But for nearly ten years he kept a diary which recorded, with unparalleled openness and sensitivity, exactly what it was like to be a young man in Restoration London. 
 
Within and beyond the narrative of his extraordinary career, Claire Tomalin explores Pepys' inner life - his relations with women, his fears and ambitions, his political shifts, his agonies and his delights. 
 
'A rich, thoughtful and deeply satisfying account' Evening Standard 
 
'Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, marital conflict, the fall of kings, corruption and courage in public life, wars, navies, public execution, incarceration in the Tower: Samuel Pepys's life is full of irresistible material' Guardian 
 
'In Claire Tomalin, Pepys has found the biographer he deserves. Her perceptive, level-headed book finally restores to the life of the diarist its weight and dignity' New Statesman

Claire Tomalin is a former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven literary biographies and has won many prizes, and her biography of Charles Dickens was an international bestseller in 2011. She is married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

Claire Tomalin's thrilling life of Pepys carried all before it when it was first published in 2002: it won the Whitbread Biography Award, and was then named Whitbread Book of the Year. Tomalin paints an unforgettable portrait of the man himself - diarist, civil servant, restless husband - who was present as a child at the execution of Charles l and later in life found himself briefly imprisoned in the Tower before 
dying peacefully in Clapham at the beginning of the new century. And in the background are a cast of hundred populating Tomalin's teeming canvas: from Nell Gwynn to Titus Oates, from pimps to puritans, from baronets to bawdy-house keepers.

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft

The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft is the acclaimed bestselling biography by Claire Tomalin 
 
Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize 
 
Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published A Vindication of the Rights of Women; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention. 
 
'Tomalin is a most intelligent and sympathetic biographer, aware of her impetuous subject's many failings, yet with the perception to present her greatness fairly. She writes well and wittily' Daily Telegraph 
 
'A vivid evocation not only of what Mary went through but also of how women lived in the second part of the eighteenth century. Most of all, however, Tomalin makes Mary Wollstonecraft unforgettable' Evening Standard 
 
From the acclaimed author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, this celebrated biography is the definitive account of Mary Wollstonecraft's life. 
 
Claire Tomalin is the award-winning author of eight highly acclaimed biographies, including: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens; Mrs Jordan's Profession; Jane Austen: A Life; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self; Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man and, most recently, Charles Dickens: A Life. A former literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, she is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

Claire Tomalin has been the literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times. She has written seven highly acclaimed literary biographies including Samuel Pepys which was Whitbread Book of the Year and the international bestseller Charles Dickens. She is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.

Witty, courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published A Vindication of the Rights of Women, lived through the Terror in France, had an illegitimate daughter and married the philosopher William Godwin before dying in childbirth at the age of 38. 
Claire Tomalin's first book inaugurated a glittering career, and brought to life one of the great figures in the history of women.

Claire Tomalin

Changing the World

How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction? 
 
From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds transformed his life and catapulted him to international fame; he became the writer who most inspired Orwell and countless others, and predicted men walking on the moon seventy years before it happened. 
 
In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today.

Claire Tomalin

The Young H.G. Wells

Select a format:

Retailers:

Summary

More books from this author