"A Life of My Own," by Claire Tomalin

Once in a long while, I love a book so much that I hesitate to write about it here, because I worry that I won’t do it justice. Claire Tomalin’s recent book, “A Life of My Own” (Penguin, 2017) is an example. Tomalin is a well-known English literary editor, critic, and esteemed biographer of great figures of British literature such as Mary Wollstonecraft, Samuel Pepys, Shelley, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, and Katherine Mansfield. So you already have an inkling of why I am so drawn to this writer. But to be more explicit: she is English (as you may remember, I am a bit of an Anglophile); she is a woman; she has been involved in literary matters her whole life; she has terrific taste in writers (several of the subjects of her biographies are among my favorites – in particular Austen and Hardy); she has lived a long and full life outside of her literary work as well, with a complicated and fulfilling – if sometimes difficult -- family life, including two marriages and four children. After being a biographer of so many others, in this book, at the age of 80-plus, she writes about herself. One of her themes, about which she is clear but not didactic, is the question for all women who want to “balance” a life in literature and a full family life of just how to do that; she does not shy away from describing how hard that balancing act sometimes is, but she also does not dwell on it. She writes engagingly about her family, her childhood, her education, her romances, her marriages, her travels, her various literary jobs, her own writing, the other writers she has known personally, her children, and much more. But what I am afraid of not being able to convey is what a wonderful, wonderful writer she is. She also strikes me as a fascinating (although unpretentious and down-to-earth in some ways) person, and her autobiography makes me wish I knew her personally. I loved reading this book, and I highly recommend it to you; do please consider reading it.