Interview: In a career spanning 30 years, Claire Tomalin has brought some of literature's greatest figures to life, including Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys and now Thomas Hardy. Louise East talks to her at her London home.
Biographer Claire Tomalin is under no illusion that everyone loves the subject of her latest book, Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man.
"I'm married to a man who thinks his novels are tosh," she says with a characteristic hoot of laughter. "He's wrong, of course."
The husband in question, novelist and playwright Michael Frayn, is a constant presence in Tomalin's conversation (she waves her hand vaguely in the direction of an upstairs study whenever his name crops up) but he's not the only writer inhabiting their Richmond home.
Rather, drinking coffee in the kitchen is like attending a fabulous literary salon frequented solely by the dead. Jane Austen and Katherine Mansfield are introduced as old friends; the shades of Hardy and Samuel Pepys flit past, and Charles Dickens is referred to with a rueful laugh.
Long before her Pepys biography won the Whitbread Prize in 2003, Tomalin's reputation as one of Britain's finest biographers was confirmed In a career spanning 30 years, what is intriguing about her biographies - eight in total, some short, some long, all elegant, erudite and scrupulously researched - is the diversity of their subjects.
Her early works on Wollstonecraft, Mansfield and Austen suggest a feminist sensibility keenly interested in writers and thinkers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Mrs Jordan's Profession, her biography of William IV's consort, Dora Jordan, and The Invisible Woman, detailing actress Nelly Ternan's relationship with Dickens, reveal Tomalin's talent for turning the spotlight on history's bit-part players.
Then along came Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, her vivid account of a 17th-century diarist who was neither female, Victorian nor marginal. In one fell swoop, Tomalin removed herself from all that was familiar to her, and proved she could thrive.
And now there is Thomas Hardy, the notably prolific author of 17 novels and nearly 1,000 poems, whose one tendency towards brevity was when it concerned himself.
"He was a very elusive subject. He didn't want to be known," Tomalin says, with what appears to be approval. "Compared with writing a biography of Dickens, who showed himself off, or even of George Eliot, who reveals a good deal of herself in her letters, Hardy's letters are very sparse, very dry and there are hardly any of them."
Tomalin continued undeterred, in part because she had decided on a literary, rather than a historical, biography, drawing particularly on Hardy's work as a poet. "He said himself that his poetry was full of autobiography whereas the novels are not. I thought, well that's a way in."
For Tomalin, it is context as much as content that matters. The magic of The Unequalled Self is in the view it affords of Pepys romping through the streets of Restoration London, while her life of Mansfield also holds a mirror to the lives of DH Lawrence, John Middleton Murry and others.
"One of the things biography can do very well is to act as a prism. It can throw light on the period," she muses. "I do think context is at least half the work of the biographer. Biographies that are simply the life are rather thin."
What unites her own seemingly disparate biographies is a life-long interest in people who rise to great achievement from small beginnings.
"Pepys's father was a tailor, his mother was a washerwoman. Hardy's father was a small builder and his mother was a domestic servant. I detest," she stops to laugh at her own vehemence, "I detest people who say that Shakespeare couldn't have written Shakespeare's plays because he was only a grammar school boy.
"When I started, I really wanted to write about women who'd been under- rated or ignored or forgotten. That was a very strong motive for me . . . But, I'm happy to say, that was 30 years ago and now the world is full of eager historians and biographers digging out obscure women. It's very difficult to find them any more. I'm pleased it's happened, but it makes more problems for people like me."
TALKING TO TOMALIN, one is reminded of the fundamental bind of the biographer. What publishers and the book-buying public desire is books about people well-loved or well-known (Tomalin wryly describes her Austen biography, Jane Austen: A Life as "simply romping away, as far as sales go") yet for the literary detective such well-worn lives offer little chance of a "eureka" moment of discovery. "I do think that writing about minor figures, if you can find the right one, is more thrilling," she says a little wistfully. Increasingly too, with biography enjoying a lengthy sojourn in the sun, subjects worthy of biography, major or minor, are thin on the ground. Tomalin talks glowingly of recent work by two friends - Victoria Glendinning on Leonard Woolf and Brenda Maddox on Freud biographer Ernest Jones - but admits to experiencing moments of pique.
"Just occasionally, you think, 'Oh bother, I wish I'd thought of that'."
Tomalin is, by her own admission, an accidental biographer. The child of a French academic father and an English musician mother who divorced acrimoniously and at length, she moved from boarding school to Cambridge to publishing, before leaping the fence to join the New Statesman.
It was while she was on maternity leave, awaiting the birth of her fifth child (by first husband, journalist Nick Tomalin) that she wrote a one-page essay on Mary Wollstonecraft. It prompted a flood of letters from publishers and agents and Tomalin embarked on a biography.
"It was absolutely thrilling," she says now. "Much more exciting to come from nowhere to write a book which nobody expects anything of and to find it succeeds. I had to teach myself research."
It wasn't all plain sailing - on completing the book, she had to return to the British Library to track down all the sources she had originally failed to note - yet her voice softens as she describes "one of those moments you never forget", when the previously untraced birth certificate of Wollstonecraft's illegitimate daughter arrived in the post from France.
It was just as she completed that book, in 1973, that Nick Tomalin was killed while reporting in the Golan Heights. It was not the first, nor was it to be the last, tragedy of Tomalin's life. Of her five children, one died as a baby, a daughter committed suicide at the age of 22 and her youngest son was born with spina bifida (he is now an active wheelchair user, living nearby in Richmond).
Tomalin took on the literary editorship of the New Statesman (commissioning Julian Barnes, Timothy Mo and Martin Amis) until a commission for what would be her Katherine Mansfield biography suggested to her that she could earn a living from her writing: "Quite wrongly, as it turned out. I was in fairly dire straits."
Her subsequent return to journalism, as literary editor of the Sunday Times, caused a hiatus in her writing career which only ended when she walked out over the paper's move to Wapping. Her next book, The Invisible Woman, uncovered actress Nelly Ternan's possible affair with Charles Dickens ("I've had old gentlemen begging me to say it was not so") and won her the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for biography.
Ask Tomalin what traits of her own she feels make her a good biographer and she answers without hesitation: "Patience. Persistence. Curiosity. A wish to try and get things right. And also," she pauses, searching carefully for the right words, "I suppose in some cases perhaps, a feeling that justice hasn't been done. I thought Pepys was too often referred to as good little Pepys, the comic figure with his naughty sex life, when it seemed to me that he is actually a great writer. What he did was an extraordinary artistic achievement. Similarly, Hardy is a much-loved English writer but he has always been condescended to rather. One friend wrote to me saying they were looking forward to being convinced that Hardy wasn't rather a clonking poet."
SUBSEQUENT TO IT winning the Whitbread, Tomalin's Pepys biography became a bestseller, while the fact that it and her husband's novel, Spies, were slugging it out for first place in the book charts grabbed the public's attention.
"People were so odd about that," says Tomalin, who was asked repeatedly whether they were jealous of each other. "The fact is, it was good for both of us. We were virtually co-winners."
Although they met in 1980, Tomalin and Frayn only married in 1993 when they were both 60 ("It was a sort of birthday present to each other"). They both work at home, only showing work to each other when it's completed. Tomalin admits that a certain amount of work talk does take place at the supper table.
"I try not to talk about it, but I'm afraid I do," she says.
The old coach house in Richmond, to which they moved three years ago ("It's a kind of idyll really") allowed Tomalin indulge a passion for gardening, and the expansive plot out back is rich with apple trees, raspberry canes, and weathered kitchen-garden walls. Inside is a wonderful combination of big windows, ink sketches, and comfy chairs. Books, needless to say, are everywhere.
"I've read too much," Tomalin says somewhat unexpectedly. "Partly because I love reading and partly because it was a wonderful escape from life. But I look at Michael, who has read much less than I do and I think, look what he's been doing. He's been thinking."
Recently, Tomalin startled her husband by announcing that she plans to destroy her own letters before her death.
"Michael said, 'How can you say that? You're a biographer'," she says with a laugh. "I said, 'Well, I'm entitled to'." So does she, then, feel uneasy about reading the private papers of others? "Not really," she says briskly. "I'm always quoting Voltaire, who said you must treat the people who are alive with respect but all you owe to the dead is the truth. I think most people, if really pushed, would agree. [ When you die] you go into another category of history and human experience. What harm can it do you then?"
With luck, it will be a long time before Tomalin burns those letters. At 73, she could easily pass for 10 years younger and is still at the forefront of her field.
"I think being old is quite good for biographers," she says with asperity. "When you're younger you do tend to sit in judgment a bit. In my book on Mary Wollstonecraft, once or twice I was rather disappointed in her behaviour and I said so, like a schoolmistress. It's not really a helpful stance. I think when you've lived a long life yourself and have done a lot of bad things, you are more inclined to sort of understand."
Louise East is a freelance journalist