Claire Tomalin (née Delavenay; born 20 June 1933) is an English journalist and biographer known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Early life

Tomalin was born Claire Delavenay on 20 June 1933 in London, the daughter of English composer Muriel Herbert and French academic Émile Delavenay.

Education

Tomalin was educated at Hitchin Girls' Grammar School, a former state grammar school in Hitchin in Hertfordshire, at Dartington Hall School, a former boarding-school in Devon, and at Newnham College at the University of Cambridge.

Career

Since then she has published: Tomalin organised two exhibitions about the Regency actress Mrs Jordan at Kenwood House in 1995, and about Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley in 1997. In 2004 she unveiled a blue plaque for Mary Wollstonecraft at 45 Dolben Street, Southwark, where Wollstonecraft lived from 1788. She has served on the Committee of the London Library, and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust. She is a Vice-President of the Royal Literary Fund, the Royal Society of Literature and of English PEN. She is also a member of the American Philosophical Society.

Personal life

Tomalin married her first husband, fellow Cambridge graduate Nicholas Tomalin, a journalist, in 1955, and they had three daughters and two sons. He was killed while reporting on the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973. She worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then The Sunday Times, while bringing up her children. She married the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn in 1993. They live in Petersham, London.

Awards and honours

Works