Claire Tomalin Libros

Focuses on the remarkable diaries of Pepys and brings his story vividly to life once more.

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats.

A title that involves us so deeply that Austen's final illness and death come almost as a personal tragedy to the reader. It presents Austen as remarkably clever; sensitive, but sentimental; tough, yet observant; guarded; and a woman with the devil of a genius in her.

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.

Chronicles the life of the nineteenth-century literary master from the challenges he faced as the imprisoned son of a profligate father, his rise to one of England's foremost novelists, and the personal demons that challenged his relationships.

From the author's study of the Austen family papers, this title paints a picture of the Austen clan and their neighbours, and concludes that the facts of Jane Austen's life were even more extravagant and romantic than her fiction.

A fascinating journey into the life of H.G. Wells, from one of Britain's best biographers How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction? From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to educate himself at any cost, to the serious ill health that dominated his twenties and thirties, his complicated marriages, and love affair with socialism, the first forty years of H. G. Wells' extraordinary life would set him on a path to become one of the world's most influential writers. The sudden success of The Time Machine and The War of The Worlds transformed his life and catapulted him to international fame; he became the writer who most inspired Orwell and countless others, and predicted men walking on the moon seventy years before it happened. In this remarkable, empathetic biography, Claire Tomalin paints a fascinating portrait of a man like no other, driven by curiosity and desiring reform, a socialist and a futurist whose new and imaginative worlds continue to inspire today. 'The finest of biographers' Hilary Mantel 'A most intelligent and sympathetic biographer' Daily Telegraph 'One of the best biographers of her generation' Guardian

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.

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.

he Invisible Woman by Claire Tomalin is the acclaimed story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens. It is the winner of the NCR Book Award, the Hawthornden Prize and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. 'This is the story of someone who - almost - wasn't there; who vanished into thin air. Her names, dates, family and experiences very nearly…