Claire Tomalin
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- 3 works
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Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self
Claire Tomalin
For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would establish him as the greatest diarist in the English language.
Against the backdrop of plague, civil war, and regicide, with John Milton composing diplomatic correspondence for Oliver Cromwell, Christopher Wren drawing up plans to rebuild London, and Isaac Newton advancing the empirical study of the world around us, Tomalin weaves a breathtaking account of a figure who has passed on to us much of what we know about seventeenth-century London. We witness Pepys’s early life and education, see him advising King Charles II before running to watch the great fire consume London, learn about the great events of the day as well as the most intimate personal details that Pepys encrypted in the Diary, follow him through his later years as a powerful naval administrator, and come…
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
Claire Tomalin
When Ellen Ternan met Charles Dickens, she was 18 and he was 45. She was a hard-working actress in a society that equated her profession with prostitution, or something close to it. Dickens was the most lionized writer in England, the great bard of domestic virtue. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens’ marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record. In this tour de force of scholarly reconstruction, the acclaimed biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft and Katherine Mansfield rescues Nelly from the shadows of history and creates a deeply compassionate work that encompasses all those women who were exiled from the warm, well-lighted parlors of Victorian England.
Claire Tomalin
The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover’s shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today’s preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.
