Several strangers: Writing from three decades

by Claire Tomalin

Claire Tomalin is best known for a series of acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs Jordan, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan and, most recently, Jane Austen. But she has also worked as a publisher, critic and journalist, and she reviews and broadcasts collected here are from three decades as a literary journalist. Their subjects range from women's history to modern fiction, letters and biographies of the great - Dickens, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath - to more obscure but no less intriguing figures such as Dame Ethel Smyth ("Ancient Mariner" and "Belle Dame Sans Merci" rolled into one) and Edith Nesbit, who managed to keep three households going and to write some of the richest and most long-lasting children's books. In three introductory essays to the main sections of the book, Claire Tomalin describes her own career, which began in London during the fifties and included a period as literary editor of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, at a time when both of these papers were particularly vibrant and creative. The result is a vivid portrait of the literary scene over those decades and also a candid account of a woman's professional life - how it began in the male-dominated workplace of London publishing, and how family demands and circumstances propelled and shaped it. In the first essay Claire Tomalin notes that Jane Austen wrote "Seven years...are enough to change every pore of one's skin, and every feeling of one's mind". "Several Strangers" characteristically combines a personal openness with a wide range of literary sympathies to portray the development of a literary career and a continuing fascination with books and writers.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography Memoir

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Born Claire Delavenay in London, she was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.

She became literary editor of the 'New Statesman' and also the 'Sunday Times'. She has written several noted biographies and her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize for 'The Invisible Woman The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens'.

In addition, her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003.

She married her first husband, Nicholas Tomalin, who was a prominent journalist but who was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973. Her second husband is the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn.

She is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English PEN (International PEN).

Reviews

[Martine Bailey · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adore Clare Tomalin's biographies, so picked up this book of her reviews to get a broader idea of her work. I enjoyed many of her remarkable reviews and always gained a new perspective on well-loved writers: E Nesbitt, Doris Lessing, Katherine Mansfield, to name a few. I found it a dip-in book rather than a full-on read but it was always thought-provoking and intelligent.

[Jeremy Walton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Claire bears
I recently bought this in a second-hand bookshop, remembering how much I had enjoyed reading the author’s memoir a few years ago. She’s a pleasant, careful writer with an attractive turn of phrase; this volume is made up of essays and reviews from her career at the New Statesman, Sunday Times and elsewhere. These are interspersed with her personal recollections about her family, work and colleagues, which are framed by her efforts to overcome the prejudices associated with her gender in that less enlightened time - crystallized on p4, where she describes applying to the BBC after graduating from Cambridge: "I was bilingual in French, with good secretarial skills, and a First, but the response was a short letter informing me 'that the competition for General Trainees is confined to men'. (I still have the letter.)" At home, she recalls "crying into a washbasin full of soapy grey baby clothes - there were no washing machines [in the 1950s] - while my handsome and adored husband was off playing football in the park on Sunday morning with all the delightful young men who had been friends to both of us at Cambridge three years earlier" [p204].

Perhaps reflecting her desire to correct such imbalances, the reviews collected here initially focus on female authors, but soon broaden out to encompass a variety of characters, at least initially. There are a few of her subjects that I know a little about (Ottoline Morrell. E.M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, A.A. Milne, Oscar Wilde, Philip Larkin), but am mostly ignorant about the majority (Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Wolff, Christina Rossetti, George Elliot, Jean Rhys, Mrs Gaskell, Constance Garnett, E. Nesbit,...). The book inspires a desire to redress that balance - for example, it includes Tomalin's excellent forward to "Mrs Dalloway" in the 1992 OUP edition, which I'd like to get hold of.

There are some nice touches in these passages: the publisher Charles Monteith thoughtfully turning the pages of his new catalogue before avowing, "I'm afraid ... I don't think there's *anything* interesting in our spring list, Claire" ("I wanted to hug him" is her response) [p39], the sad words of Philip Morrell (who'd recently taken up bridge - "a game not heard of at Garsington") on his deathbed: "Partner, we can't make it. We haven't got enough hearts" [p67], the praise of Dorothy Parker for E.M. Forster, which Tomalin describes as a "an improvement on earlier Americans who had been inclined to congratulate him on his Hornblower books" [p112] and, in a review of a book about infant mortality in the nineteenth century, noting that "parents could be consoled by looking forward to being reunited with the dead child there, although the idea of being eternally reunited with an infant seems less than blissful, unless they imagined angelic nursemaids too" [p234].

A stimulating, readable collection. Recommended.