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
applied days deputy editor heard job literary remember three work
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 remember thinking, 'That's perfect.' It was three days a week, and I had children, but I could make that work - so I applied for it and got it.
later music nobody passages poetry prose radio tells time
'Words and Music' on Radio 3 is always a treat. Actors read passages of poetry and prose interspersed with music, and nobody tells you what it is. Later you can look it up online, but at the time you can't cheat.
charles
Writing Charles Dickens' biography is like writing five biographies.
adopt obliged writers
Writers often feel obliged to adopt some sort of public appearance.
directed good shut towards trying writers
Writers don't make good spouses. When I am writing, I'm not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I'm trying to write.
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.
perhaps
I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.
kept quite realised
When I kept a diary, I realised that it was all moanings and depression, and I think that is quite common.
love normal people quite
I think it's quite normal for people to have love affairs.
certainly christmas works
'A Christmas Carol' has been described as the most perfect of Dickens's works and as a quintessential heart-warming story, and it is certainly the most popular.
I'm usually convinced that what I'm working on is a total disaster.
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.