Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin has written the standard modern lives of Pepys, Dickens, Hardy, Austen, Mary Wollstonecraft and Nelly Ternan, and came to biography after twenty years in newspapers and a series of private catastrophes. She read English at Cambridge, worked as an editor and then as literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times, and published her first book, on Wollstonecraft, at forty-one. Her husband, the reporter Nicholas Tomalin, was killed by a missile in the Golan Heights in 1973, leaving her with four children, one of whom had spina bifida and died in infancy; her son Tom was born with the same condition and lived. A daughter killed herself in 1980. The books that followed are unusually attentive to the people who stand at the edge of a famous life: The Invisible Woman recovered Nelly Ternan, the actress Dickens concealed for thirteen years, from almost nothing, and reset how that marriage and that concealment are understood; Mrs Jordan's Profession did the same for an actress who bore ten children to a future king and was discarded. Her Pepys won the Whitbread book of the year in 2002 and her Dickens appeared for the bicentenary in 2011. She married the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn in 1993. She has said she writes about the dead because they cannot object. She was made a Companion of Literature and holds several honorary doctorates. Her memoir A Life of My Own appeared in 2017 and covers the deaths in her family directly. She lives in Petersham with Frayn.

• Lived: 1933 CE – ?
• Nationality: British
• Roles: writer