Samuel Pepys is the astonishing biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year. "Immaculately well done. Tomalin has managed to unearth a wealth of material about the uncharted life of Samuel Pepys". (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday). "Sex, drink, plague, fire, music, mar[...]

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband but a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized [...]

Pursuing art and adventure across Europe, Katherine Mansfield lived and wrote with the Furies at her heels. Dying at the age of only 34, she became posthumously one of the most influential writers of the last century. Sexually ambiguous, craving love yet quarrelsome and capricious, she glittered in [...]

At her death in 1817, Jane Austen left the world six of the most beloved novels written in English--but her shortsighted family destroyed the bulk of her letters; and if she kept any diaries, they did not survive her. Now acclaimed biographer Claire Tomalin has filled the gaps in the record, creatin[...]

Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens's marriage while effacing Nel[...]