Summary: England’s pre-eminent literary biographer Claire Tomalin discusses the art of biography with Caroline Baum. Claire started her career with a wish to scrupulously examine the lives of women – such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen, the actress Mrs Jordan and Nelly Ternan (Dickens’s mistress) – and has gone on to write major studies of diarist Samuel Pepys, poet and novelist Thomas Hardy and, most recently, Charles Dickens.
