Claire Tomalin

The definitive biography of a man who was a hardworking journalist, tireless supporter of liberal social causes but, most of all, a great novelist and creator of characters who live on in the English imagination.

The story of the life of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens is a remarkable work of biography and historical revisionism. It not only returns the neglected actress to her rightful place in history, but provides a compelling and truthful portrait of the great Victorian novelist.

The author's study of family papers enables her to paint a rich picture of Jane Austen describing a different view of the novelist than that previously known.

Truly courageous and radical, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial women of her day. She wrote a treatise on the rights of women, and lived in France during the revolution. She never gave up her radical views or her belief that honesty and courage would triumph over convention.

Acclaimed as the greatest comic actress of her day, Dora Jordan lived a quite different role off-stage as lover to Prince William, third son of George III. The story of how Dora moved between the worlds of the theatre and happy domesticity, of her fights for her family and her career makes a classic story of royal perfidy and female courage.

The 2003 winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year Prize, this is a magnificent and readable biography of Samuel Pepys.

Tomalin provides great insight into the thoughts and emotions of Thomas Hardy, the great English poet and novelist, who is portrayed as a man of great contradictions.

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.

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, vividly and frankly portraying the social pressures on a woman in the fifties and sixties.