Claire Tomalin

An extraordinary memoir of love, loss and literature from one of Britain''''s best biographers.As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life.This enthralling memoir follows her through triumph and tragedy in about equal measure, from the disastrous marriage of her parents and the often difficult wartime childhood that followed, to her own marriage to the brilliant young journalist Nicholas Tomalin. When he was killed on assignment as a war correspondent she was left to bring up their four children - and at the same time make her own career.She writes of the intense joys of a fascinating progression as she became one of the most successful literary editors in London before discovering her true vocation as a biographer, alongside overwhelming grief at the loss of a child.Writing with the elan and insight which characterize her biographies, Claire Tomalin sets her own life in a wider cultural and political context, vividly and frankly portraying the social pressures on a woman in the Fifties and Sixties, and showing ''''how it was for a European girl growing up in mid-twentieth-century England ... carried along by conflicting desires to have children and a worthwhile working life.''''

Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. This seminal biography, by our leading biographer, covers Hardy's illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling novelist, and in later life, his supreme achievements as a poet.

From her study of the Austen family papers, Claire Tomalin paints a rich, tragi-comic picture of the Austen clan and their neighbours, reaching the conclusion that the facts of Jane Austen's life were even more extravagant and romantic than her fiction.

'This is the story of someone who - almost - wasn't there; who vanished into thin air. Her names, dates, family and experiences very nearly disappeared from the record for good . . . ' Claire Tomalin's multi-award-winning story of the life of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens is a remarkable work of biography and historical revisionism that returns the neglected actress to her rightful place in history as well as providing a compelling and truthful portrait of the great Victorian novelist.

Claire Tomalin writes biographies that are as compulsive to read as they are insightful, and her narrative virtuosity was rewarded in 2002 when her biography of Samuel Pepys, published by Penguin, won the Whitbread Book of the Year. In Young Bysshe Tomalin tells the story of the formative years of the poet Shelley - and brings the young man and the world that influenced him so profoundly vividly to life.

1ª edición con muchas imágenes en ilustracion. Traducción de Beatriz López-Buisán.

Katherine Mansfield, escritora neozelandesa, llegó a Inglaterra como joven promesa y se convirtió en una figura de culto. Durante su corta y trágica vida estuvo rodeada por futuros autores de prestigio como: D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, L. Stratchey

Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen--the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself "formidable," a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from black depressions, who showed unfailing loyalty and, in the conduct of her own life, unfailing bravery. In an act of understanding and brilliant synthesis, Claire Tomalin reveals Jane Austen with a clarity never before achieved, one which makes us look upon her novels with fresh and even greater admiration. The world she wrote about--that place of civility and reassuring stability--was never quite her own. As Tomalin shows, Jane Austen''s family existed on the very fringe of the world she described in her fiction, struggling to get ahead with little money and no land in the competitive society of Georgian England, sometimes succeeding but often failing with painful consequences. New research in family papers has yielded a rich, tragicomic picture of the Austen clan--their ambitions, their matrimonial alliances, their exotic connections with India and France. At the same time, Tomalin''s explorations in local archives reveal a surprising view of the neighbors the family lived among in Hampshire, more extravagant and eccentric by far than anyone depicted in Austen''s books. We realize how much closer her genius lies, in its splendid artifice, to the great comic operas of Mozart than to the main tradition of the English novel. But it is in the deeply human portrait of Jane Austen herself that this biography excels. The honesty and directness of her personality (perfect heroines made her "sick and wicked"), her strength ingiving up a chance at marriage to follow the path her vocation as a writer required her to take, the warmth and long consistency of her relationship with her sister, Cassandra, the poignancy of her death--Claire Tomalin here captures, with unforgettable skill, the living character of a great writer who is read, reread, read again, and adored, now more than ever.

La tumultuosa vida del mejor novelista inglés, maravillosamente escrita por la gran biógrafa Claire Tomalin. Con grabados, tres cuadernillos de fotos y mapas de la época.Como cualquiera de sus héroes de novela Charles Dickens sufrio hasta la saciedad. Nacido en una modesta familia de clase media, su vida dio un vuelco cuando encarcelaron a su padre y tuvo que ponerse a trabajar en una fabrica. Este hecho le sirvio para agudizar su vision de lo absurdo, de lo tragico de la vida en Londres. Periodista incisivo, padre de diez hijos, incansable paseante y viajero, defensor de las libertades sociales y por encima de todo... novelista, Charles Dickens fue un genio. .La prosa novelistica de la biografa Claire Tomalin, profusamente documentada, nos ofrece en Charles Dickens el retrato de un escritor heroico y virtuoso, un hombre al mismo tiempo contradictorio y ruin en el bicentenario de su nacimiento.***Mejor biografia segun The Galaxy Awards 2011Reseñas:Este libro es una biografia magnifica sobre un gran escritor...William Boyd,The ObserverPerfecta en cada uno de los detalles historicos y perspicaz en las novelas, la magistral biografia de Claire Tomalin es enormemente valiosa por la vision que nos da del hombre mas que del escritor...

El pensamiento y la obra de Mary Wollstonecraft fueron un auténtico revulsivo en la sociedad de su época. Impulsora de las reivindicaciones feministas, su vida y muerte (provocada a los treinta y ocho años por una infeccion contraida en un parto) trazan la imagen de un espiritu apasionado y valiente.Su voz alerto sobre la discriminacion social de la mujer como clase oprimida; su ideal, la igualdad de hombres y mujeres.Admirable. De la mano de Tomalin podremos conocer mucho mas sobre Mary Wollstonecraft de lo que cualquier otra persona en su vida, e incluso mas de lo que sabia ella misma.THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWTomalin es una de las biografas mas inteligentes, conocedora del impetu de sus personajes, que posee el don de presentarlos en toda su grandeza.DAILY TELEGRAPHUna vivida evocacion no solo atraves de Mary sino tambien de las mujeres que vivieron en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII. Aunque por encima de todo Tomalin nos presenta a una Mary inolvidable.EVENING STANDARD