Claire Tomalin

As literary editor of the New Statesman in the 1970s, Claire Tomalin was one of the most distinguished figures in what is often now looked back on as a golden age of London literary journalism. But she had ambitions beyond the editorial chair, and went on to establish herself as a productive, accomplished and unusually wide-ranging literary biographer. Her book on Mary Wollstonecraft is an important text for feminist politics, and with her book on Jane Austen she accomplished that rarest of biographical feats, saying something new and indispensable about the greatest of all English novelists. Her books on Hardy and Pepys are also well worthy of their subjects. One of my favourites among her books, though, has a less spectacular inspiration: Katherine Mansfield. To talk intelligently about what it is like for a New Zealander to find a place in British literary society, you not only have to know a lot about British society, you need the sympathy to guess right about the colonial condition. This wide range of knowledge and intuition also shows up in her conversation, which I found fascinating even in those days when she was going through my copy with a sharp blue pencil. Years later, I was very glad to get some of her cogent talk on tape.