A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin, book review: An extraordinary account of a woman making her way in a man’s world

The literary editor and biographer’s memoir is as packed full of incident, famous friends and colleagues as any of her legendary subjects, but it also documents the many tragedies she has suffered

After taking tea with Leonard Woolf, then close to the end of his life, in the mid-1960s, Claire Tomalin recalls coming away grateful to have met a man “who had lived at the heart of the culture of his time”. The same, it soon becomes apparent, could be said of Tomalin herself, the literary editor and biographer who’s lived a life as packed full of incident, import and famous friends and colleagues as any of her legendary subjects (Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield, Samuel Pepys, and Charles Dickens to name but a few). Now, in a memoir aptly titled A Life of My Own, the 84-year-old Tomalin has brought the same clarity of narrative to her own existence.

In some ways, it reads like fiction; or, when it comes to the hardships and tragedies she’s suffered, one wishes it was. Her first son died shortly after his birth, and her second, Tom, was born with spina bifida, the surgical interventions needed to save his life fraught with danger. In 1973, her first husband and the father of her four children the journalist Nicholas Tomalin was killed while reporting in Israel. Then, seven years later, her 22-year-old daughter Susanna committed suicide while suffering from severe depression.

It seems trite to point out that such loss would have defeated many, but it’s clear from this elegantly written and insightful work that Tomalin is a woman of rare fortitude of character and intellect. “Grief has to be set aside,” she explains, “but it does not go away.” The other side to her story is one of splendid successes – from the first-class degree with which she left Cambridge in the 1950s; through her early years as a reader at Heinemann; her time on the New Statesman’s books pages, followed by literary editor at The Sunday Times; writing her prize-winning biographies – all while raising her children.

She’s just self-deprecating enough about her achievements. “Only Paul Johnson chastised me for leaving,” she writes of her decision not to buckle under “Murdoch’s mixture of bullying and bribery” when The Sunday Times moved to Wapping in 1986, “saying I owed it to English Literature to remain. But English Literature kept going pretty well.” Perhaps, but it’s a landscape much changed, this book documenting a world that for the most part no longer exists.

Tomalin’s title doesn’t merely allude to the biographer-turned-memoirist, the Woolfian echoes are significant since this is also an extraordinary account of a woman making her way in what’s by and large a man’s world. In 1955 she’s given a mark out of 10 for her looks when interviewed at Heinemann: “seven, just enough to be offered the job.” In the Sixties, the editor of The Observer David Astor tells her she “should stay at home and look after the children” – thankfully she pays him no notice. And at The Sunday Times in the Eighties, she does her bit for the battle between the sexes by adorning the literary department with photos of male models from gay magazines to rival the girly pin-ups throughout the office.

A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin is published by Penguin (£16.99)