“What on earth can I tell you about life? I know nothing about life!”, insists Claire Tomalin as we begin our interview. Coming from a woman whose profession rests on exploring the lives of others, this is hard to believe. As the celebrated biographer of Dickens, Pepys, Hardy, Shelley, Mansfield and Austen, Tomalin has resurrected some of Britain’s most famous authors. Why? “I think it was Thomas Hardy who said that real life is far more surprising than novels. People are interested in reading about human lives.”

Tomalin’s life warrants a biography of its own.  Born in 1933, she was educated in London and studied English at Newnham College. “It felt extraordinary to get into Cambridge in the 1950’s because there were ten male undergraduates to every female. It was like a dream. Cambridge seizes you by the heart and you never forget it”. 

After Cambridge, she did the “muddled things that women of my time did”, training as a secretary before marrying journalist Nick Tomalin. This struggle to balance motherhood and a career was described in her article discussing Sylvia Plath: “I hadwanted to do something with my life – I thought I had some capacities, and here they were going down the plughole”.  Matters only worsened for Tomalin though. Her third child, a boy, died in infancy and her marriage was deteriorating badly. In search of a promising career, Tomalin became the assistant literary editor of the New Statesman, until her fifth child, Tom, was born with spina bifida in 1970. While nursing him at home, she wrote her first acclaimed biography of Mary Wollstonecraft. “She was my first subject and it was so extraordinary to find this woman in the late eighteenth century living in London, working on a magazine and having a difficult time as a mother, which was exactly what I was doing”. However, just before The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft was due for publication, Nick was killed while reporting on the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973. She received the Whitbread Book Award the following year with mixed feelings: “I was very lucky and very unlucky”.

After returning to the New Statesman as literary editor, Tomalin began an exciting period of her life described as her “youth”. “You had to make sure that there’s something in those literary pages every week that everybody in London wants to read. That sort of excitement, that adrenalin, was terrific”. She commissioned legendary authors such as Clive James and Paul Theroux, while her assistants included Julian Barnes and Martin Amis, with whom she had an affair. Later, after leaving her position at The Sunday Times, Tomalin entered an “extremely lonely” profession as a full-time biographer, before marrying playwright Michael Frayn in 1993. I wonder if they ever collaborate on their writing? “We never show each other anything until it’s finished. It’s a rather terrifying moment to hand it over… but we listen to each other. The curious thing about being a writer is that you’re constantly setting yourself up to be judged by other people – it’s difficult”. Have public perceptions of the genre changed over the years? “Biography has become so much more popular with writers. I started writing in the early 1970’s when academics were scornful about biography and tended to say it was just gossip. Now, every academic who can is writing one!” I ask whether she thinks that the success of her books is inextricable from her choice of subjects. “One of the things that my books have in common is that I’ve written about people who were born poor, without privilege and advantage, and who made their way and their own success. That’s important to me”. As a self-described “feminist”, Tomalin is renowned for voicing the untold stories of marginal women like Mrs Jordan, King William IV’s mistress, or Nellie Ternan, the actress who had an affair with Dickens. “What I wanted to do was to see what Nellie’s life was like … She represents a great number of women who disappeared, the women out of history who didn’t fit in with what people expected a great man to be”.Reminded of A.S.Byatt’s Possession, a novel showing how the art of biography can shade into obsession, I ask about her relationship with her subject. “It absolutely, completely takes over your life. Over the last 15 years, I’ve spent 5 years researching and writing about Samuel Pepys, 5 years researching and writing about Thomas Hardy and 5 years on Dickens. I haven’t really seen enough of my family, or life, because I’ve lived in those minds, those worlds”. However, her ability to live vicariously has been a gift to her readers: Tomalin’s career has rekindled the art of biography for our generation.