Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalin
Claire Tomalinis an English author and journalist, known for her biographies on Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen, and Mary Wollstonecraft...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth20 June 1933
life
I sometimes think that, since I started writing biographies, I've had more of a life in books than I have had in my real life.
badly behaved economic hope life position power
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 behave as badly, because you don't have the economic power.
The whole world knows Dickens, his London and his characters.
achieved childhood children country house men might older rather regret romantic saw six spent suppose vision
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 there were men around; I saw myself in a country house with six children and a garden. That has never been achieved - and I still regret it.
far films invent lives nature novels plots subjects whereas
Biographies are, in their nature, far more difficult to make into films than novels, because novels come with plots constructed and dialogue written, whereas I don't invent dialogue for my subjects or plot their lives for them.
evidence signs
Biographers search for traces, for evidence of activity, for signs of movement, for letters, for diaries, for photographs.
coming dickens forward joined nor party political power rightly saw writer
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.
dickens sons
Dickens had more energy than anyone in the world, and he expected his sons to be like him, and they couldn't be.
book despised english medieval saved
I was very priggish as a child. I saved up for a book on medieval English nunneries, for which I was despised by my friends.
people regularly since
I think people are always saying things are 'over.' Fiction has been regularly 'over' since the 19th century.
critic glorious literary
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, to take books seriously.
kept quite realised
When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.
belong good richmond society
I belong to the Richmond Concert Society, who put on very good concerts.
perhaps
I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.