Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin FRSL (birth name Claire Delavenay ; born June 20, 1933 in London ) is a British writer , best known for her extensive biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft , Katherine Mansfield , Jane Austen , Charles Dickens and Samuel Pepys , among others with the Whitbread Book Award and the Hawthornden Prize .

Life

After attending school, she studied at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge and then worked for the publishers Heinemann, Hutchinson and Cape, whereupon she worked as a journalist and literary critic for the weekly New Statesman and The Sunday Times .

For her literary debut , the biography The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft (1974), she received the 1974 Whitbread Book Award for the best first work. For her portrayal of Charles Dickens' relationship with actress Nelly Ternan , The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (1990), she received both the James Tait Black Memorial Prize , the NCR Book Award for best non-fiction and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize. In 1991 her play The Winter Wife was released , based on her biography of Katherine Mansfield.

1994 followed with Mrs. Jordan's Profession. The story of a great actress and a future King is a biography of the actress Dorothea Jordan , a long-time mistress of King Wilhelm IV. At the end of the 1990s she published a manuscript of Mary that was lost until then under the title Maurice, or the Fisher's Cot (1998) Shelley , followed in 1999 by Several Strangers: Writing from Three Decades , a collection of book reviews and journalistic articles.

Her biography of Samuel Pepys entitled Samuel Pepys. The Unequalled Self (2002), which is also a biography of Pepys' wife Elisabeth Pepys and depicts the Great Fire of London in early September 1666, not only received the Samuel Pepys Award, but also Book of the Year 2002 at the Whitbread Book Award . The 2006 under the title Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man Biography published Thomas Hardy was nominated for the prize of the Biography of the Year of the British Book Awards. Then she published two volumes of poetry, The Poems of Thomas Hardy (2007) and The Poems of John Milton (2008) . In 2011, her biography about Charles Dickens appeared .

Claire Tomalin is also a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Wordsworth Trust. She is also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Vice President of the PEN Center of Great Britain. She has been a member of the American Philosophical Society since 2012 .

Claire Tomalin, who lives in London, was first married to the journalist Nicholas Tomalin, who died during the Yom Kippur War on October 17, 1973, and has had a second marriage since 1993 with the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn .

more publishments

Shelley and His World , 1980
Parents and Children , 1981
Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life , 1987
Jane Austen: A Life , 1997

in German language

Katherine Mansfield: Eine Lebengeschichte , original title Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life , 1990, ISBN 3-458-16076-0

Film adaptations

2013: The Invisible Woman by Ralph Fiennes

Web links

Individual evidence

↑ BBC NEWS: Claire Tomalin: A life in words (January 29, 2003)
↑ THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thomas Hardy's English Lessons (book review, January 28, 2007)
^ Member History: Claire Tomalin. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 28, 2018 (with biographical notes).

personal data
SURNAME	Tomalin, Claire
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Delavenay, Claire (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	British writer
DATE OF BIRTH	June 20, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH	London

[1] BBC NEWS: Claire Tomalin: A life in words (January 29, 2003)

[2] THE NEW YORK TIMES: Thomas Hardy's English Lessons (book review, January 28, 2007)

[3] Member History: Claire Tomalin. American Philosophical Society, accessed December 28, 2018 (with biographical notes).