Claire Tomalin könyvei a rukkolán

Claire Tomalin - Thomas ​Hardy
Thomas ​Hardy is the acclaimed biography by bestselling author Claire Tomalin 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday 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 and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats. In the hands of Whitbread Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin, author of the bestselling books Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come vividly alive.

Claire Tomalin - Charles ​Dickens
The ​tumultuous life of England's greatest novelist, beautifully rendered by unparalleled literary biographer Claire Tomalin. When Charles Dickens died in 1870, The Times of London successfully campaigned for his burial in Westminster Abbey, the final resting place of England's kings and heroes. Thousands flocked to mourn the best recognized and loved man of nineteenth-century England. His books had made them laugh, shown them the squalor and greed of English life, and also the power of personal virtue and the strength of ordinary people. In his last years Dickens drew adoring crowds to his public appearances, had met presidents and princes, and had amassed a fortune. Like a hero from his novels, Dickens trod a hard path to greatness. Born into a modest middle-class family, his young life was overturned when his profligate father was sent to debtors' prison and Dickens was forced into harsh and humiliating factory work. Yet through these early setbacks he developed his remarkable eye for all that was absurd, tragic, and redemptive in London life. He set out to succeed, and with extraordinary speed and energy made himself into the greatest English novelist of the century. Years later Dickens's daughter wrote to the author George Bernard Shaw, "If you could make the public understand that my father was not a joyous, jocose gentleman walking about the world with a plum pudding and a bowl of punch, you would greatly oblige me." Seen as the public champion of household harmony, Dickens tore his own life apart, betraying, deceiving, and breaking with friends and family while he pursued an obsessive love affair. Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature-his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being- while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great-his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination, and showmanship-finally destroyed him. The man who emerges is one of extraordinary contradictions, whose vices and virtues were intertwined as surely as his life and his art.

Claire Tomalin - Jane ​Austen
From ​her study of the Austen family papers, Claire Tomalin paints a rich, tragi-comic picture of the Austen clan and their neighbours, reaching the conclusion that the facts of Jane Austen's life were even more extravagant and romantic than her fiction.

Claire Tomalin - Charles ​Dickens: A Life
Charles ​Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a tireless walker and traveller, a supporter of liberal social causes, but most of all a great novelist - the creator of characters who live immortally in the English imagination: the Artful Dodger, Mr Pickwick, Pip, David Copperfield, Little Nell, Lady Dedlock, and many more. At the age of twelve he was sent to work in a blacking factory by his affectionate but feckless parents. From these unpromising beginnings, he rose to scale all the social and literary heights, entirely through his own efforts. When he died, the world mourned, and he was buried - against his wishes - in Westminster Abbey. Yet the brilliance concealed a divided character: a republican, he disliked America; sentimental about the family in his writings, he took up passionately with a young actress; usually generous, he cut off his impecunious children. Claire Tomalin, author of Whitbread Book of the Year Samuel Pepys, paints an unforgettable portrait of Dickens, capturing brilliantly the complex character of this great genius. Charles Dickens: A Life is the examination of Dickens we deserve.

Claire Tomalin - The ​Invisible Woman
Now ​a major motion picture directed by Ralph Fiennes, co-starring Fiennes and Felicity Jones with Michelle Fairley, Kristin Scott Thomas, and Tom Hollander: the unforgettable story of Charles Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan, and of the secret relationship that linked them. When Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857, she was 18: a professional actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep. He was 45: a literary legend, a national treasure, married with ten children. This meeting sparked a love affair that lasted over a decade, destroying Dickens's marriage and ending with Nelly's near-disappearance from the public record. In this remarkable work of biography, Claire Tomalin rescues Nelly from obscurity, not only returning the neglected actress to her rightful place in history, but also giving us a compelling and truthful account of the great Victorian novelist. Through Dickens's diaries, correspondence, address books, and photographs, Tomalin is able to reconstruct the relationship between Charles and Nelly, bringing it to vivid life. The result is a riveting literary detective story - and a portrait of a singular woman.

Claire Tomalin - Charles ​Dickens élete
2012-ben ​ünnepli a világ Charles Dickens születésének kétszázadik évfordulóját. A mai napig olvassuk regényeit, karcolatait és karácsonyi történeteit - de mennyit tudunk az életéről? Nagyanyja egy főúri házban volt házvezetőnő. Apja tisztviselő a haditengerészetnél, már amikor nem ül az adósok börtönében. Dickens tizenkét éves, amikor elhelyezik egy cipőpasztagyárban - és magára hagyják. Anyja a kisebb testvérekkel a börtön környékén él, a kiskamasz Charles pedig szobát bérel és beosztja heti fizetését. Elhatározza, hogy ő soha nem fog anyagi gondokkal küzdeni. Egy év múlva apja szabadul, a család újra egyesül, de Dickens megtanulta a leckét: csak magára számíthat. Tizennyolc évesen parlamenti gyorsíró, huszonkét évesen Boz álnéven kiadja első kötetét, huszonöt évesen férj és apa, és megjelenik A Pickwick klub. Innentől pedig nincs megállás. Tíz gyerek, másfél tucat regény, két végén égő gyertya, egy új, nagy szerelem és ötvennyolc évesen a halál. Claire Tomalin, a legnépszerűbb angol életrajzíró ( Jane Austen élete) ismét bölcs, együttérző, alapos életrajzot írt egy nagy íróról, aki nem volt tökéletes, csak zseniális.

Claire Tomalin - Samuel ​Pepys
A ​full-scale biography of naval administrator Samuel Pepys, who was well-known for being the friend of the famous and powerful. This text, which draws on Pepys' own personal diary, covers his childhood and young adulthood. It moves through the famous diary years and beyond, to the death of his wife and the setting up of a new household. While using the diary as a source, the author goes beyond its narrative to the inner man, at the same time revealing life as a young man in Restoration London. Explored within are Pepys' relations with women, his fears and ambitions, his political shifts and his agonies and delights.

Claire Tomalin - Jane ​Austen élete
Jane ​Austen a világ kedvenc regényírója. Könyvei újra és újra megjelennek, mindegyik legalább öt folytatást és utánérzést szült, megfilmesítik őket, már az életéről is készült romantikus film – mindenhol beléje botlunk. Hat regény, kétkönyvnyi fiatalkori, gyakran befejezetlen írás, két regénykezdet, egy kötetnyi (megrostált és megcsonkított) levél maradt utána összesen, mikor negyvenegy évesen meghalt. „Drága húgomnak nem volt eseménydús az élete”, írta bátyja, Henry Austen. Claire Tomalin, a leghíresebb angol irodalmi biográfus, ebből a nagyon szerény anyagból írt életrajzot. George Austen tiszteletesnek és feleségének, Cassandra Leigh-nek nyolc gyermeke született, hat fiú és két lány – közülük a fiatalabb kapta a Jane nevet. Szegények voltak, de intelligensek, tehetségesek, törekvőek, „az érdem szerelmesei”. A családban esténként regényeket olvastak fel, és ha az idősebb fiúk otthon voltak egyetemi tanulmányaik szünetében, a környékbeli barátokkal színdarabokat állítottak színre a nagy pajtában. Az édesanya szívesen és könnyedén verselt, a legidősebb fiú, James, folyóiratot alapított, amelyet újság- és könyvkereskedőknél meg lehetett vásárolni – nem csoda, hogy a kislány már tinédzserként novellákat és regénykezdeményeket írt. Nemcsak Jane Austen „eseménytelen életét” ismerhetjük meg ebből a könyvből – és természetesen sokkal több minden történt vele, mint a fenti ájtatos mondatból hihetnénk –, hanem a kort, a szűkebb és tágabb Austen családot, a szomszédokat, a kiadókat, sőt még Anglia régenshercegét is. De hogy neki mi köze lehetett a vidéki paplányhoz, azt csak ebből az életrajzból tudhatjuk meg.

Claire Tomalin - The ​Life & Death of Mary Wollstonecraft
Witty, ​courageous and unconventional, Mary Wollstonecraft was one of the most controversial figures of her day. She published ‘A Vindication of the Rights of Woman’; travelled to revolutionary France and lived through the Terror and the destruction of the incipient French feminist movement; produced an illegitimate daughter; and married William Godwin before dying in childbed at the age of thirty-eight. Often embattled and bitterly disappointed, she never gave up her radical ideas or her belief that courage and honesty would triumph over convention. Winner of the Whitbread First Book Prize in 1974, this haunting biography achieved wide critical acclaim. Writing in the New Statesman, J H Plumb called it, ‘Wide, penetrating, sympathetic. There is no better book on Mary Wollstonecraft, nor is there likely to be’.