Claire Tomalin

On the London stage in the late eighteenth century, Dora Jordan was a star, probably the greatest comic actress the British theatre has ever known. Seductive and vivacious, as delightful off-stage as on, she was adored by the public and high society alike. Then, in 1791, she attracted the attentions of Prince William, the Duke of Clarence, third son of King George III, who eventually prevailed upon her to live with him. For more than twenty years, in spite of the attacks of caricaturists and satirists, she was a loyal and loving mate, bearing him ten children, helping to pay his debts out of her earnings as an actress, acting for all intents and purposes as his wife. Under pressure from the royal family and moved by his own ambitions, William abandoned her. For Dora, thrown out of her house, estranged from her children, it was a disaster; she was to die in poverty and loneliness in 1816. And while William evidently regretted the loss of the happiness he had known with her, he went on to marry a German princess and take the throne as King William IV in 1830. When his biography was published in 1884, Dora's name did not even appear in it. Claire Tomalin has here retrieved from obscurity a fascinating and important figure. She also offers us insight into an era. For Dora Jordan's tragedy, growing as it did out of the collision and interweaving of two worlds - the rough and colorful world of the Georgian theatre where she was at home, and the glittering world of the court and the aristocracy, increasingly shadowed by the pall of convention that would define Victoria's reign - is a vivid reflection of historical change.

Samuel Pepys achieved fame as a naval administrator, a friend and colleague of the powerful and learned, a figure of substance. But for nearly ten years he kept a private diary in which he recorded, with unparalleled openness and sensitivity to the turbulent world around him, exactly what it was like to be a young man in Restoration London. This diary lies at the heart of Claire Tomalin's biography. Yet the use she makes of it - and of other hitherto unexamined material - is startlingly fresh and original. Within and beyond the narrative of Pepys's extraordinary career, she explores his inner life - his relations with women, his fears and ambitions, his political shifts, his agonies and his delights.

Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies on her heels; but when she died aged only thirty-four she became one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in the brilliant circles of D.H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf, her beauty and recklessness inspiring admiration, jealousy, rage and devotion. Claire Tomalin's biography brings us nearer than we have ever been to this courageous, greatly gifted, haunted and haunting writer.

When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune. Yet like his heroes, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. His young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh factory work--but this led to his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. This biography gives full measure to Dickens's stature--his virtues both as a writer and as a human being--while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye.--From publisher description.

Whitbread Award winner Claire Tomalin's seminal biography of the enigmatic novelist and poet Thomas Hardy.Today Thomas Hardy is best known for creating the great Wessex landscape as the backdrop to his rural stories, starting with Far from the Madding Crowd, and making them classics. But his true legacy is that of a progressive thinker. When he published Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure late in his career, Hardy explored a very different world than that of his rural tales, one in which the plight of lower classes and women take center stage while the higher classes are damned. Ironically, though, Hardy remained cloaked in the arms of this very upper class during the publication of these books, acting at all times in complete convention with the rules of society. Was he using his books to express himself in a way he felt unable to do in the company he kept, or did he know sensationalism would sell? Award-winning author Claire Tomalin expertly reconstructs the life that led Hardy to maintain conventionality and write revolution.Born in Dorset in 1840, Hardy came of age in rather meager circumstances. At sixteen, he left home for London and slowly worked his way through many rejections to become a published writer. Despite his mother's admonitions to never marry, he wed Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 and, even though he fell easily in love, stayed true to her till her death in 1912. He frequently toured London society, but few felt they knew the true Hardy, and it is this very core of self that Tomalin elegantly brings us to know so completely.Hardy's work consistently challenged sexual and religious conventions in a way that few other books of his time did. Though his personal modesty and kindness allowed some to underestimate him or even to pity him, they did not prevent him from taking on the central themes of human experience-time, memory, loss, love, fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, death. And it was exactly his quiet life, full of the small, personal dramas of family quarrels, rivalries, and at times, despair, that infuses his works with the rich detail that sets them apart as masterpieces. In this engrossing biography, Tomalin skillfully identifies the inner demons and the outer mores that drove Hardy and presents a rich and complex portrait of one of the greatest figures in English literature.

"In A Life of My Own, the renowned biographer of Charles Dickens, Samuel Pepys, and Thomas Hardy, and former literary editor for the Sunday Times reflects on a remarkable life surrounded by writers and books." -- From Amazon.com summary.