Books Podcast: Claire Tomalin

In this week’s Books Podcast I talk to the incomparable Claire Tomalin — veteran literary editor, biographer of Mary Wollstonecraft, Pepys, Hardy and Dickens among others —  about her new memoir A Life of My Own.  Here’s a book that contains extraordinary hardship — domestic violence; the loss of loved ones — narrated with cool fortitude in fine prose. She talks about the sexism of old Fleet Street, the unexpected liberation of widowhood, her renunciation of poetry, and the extraordinary satisfaction, in literary biography, of finding her calling. And why being married to Michael Frayn keeps her from writing plays…

You can listen to our conversation here:

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