Claire Tomalin to give 2008 Leslie Stephen Lecture

Dr Tomalin (pictured) will give the Lecture, entitled ‘The Biographer’s Tale’, in the Senate-House at 5.30 pm. The Lecture is open to all who are interested (Senior members of the University attending should wear gowns).

The Lectures have usually been given every other year since 1907 and honour the memory of Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), the British philosopher and man of letters who helped draw out the ethical implications of Darwinism and became first editor of the Dictionary of National Biography. He was also the father of Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell.

Sir Leslie was first a student, then Fellow and Tutor and later Honorary Fellow of Trinity Hall, Cambridge. The Lecture was endowed by his friends with the specification that it be a single lecture on “some literary subject, including therein criticism, biography and ethics” and the University established the Lectureship in 1905. The first Lecturer in 1907 was (Sir) Walter Raleigh, Professor of English Literature at Oxford, who lectured on Samuel Johnson.

Claire Tomalin is an Honorary Fellow of Newnham College and of Lucy Cavendish College, and also an Honorary Member of Magdalene College. She initially worked in publishing before becoming literary editor of both the New Statesman magazine and the Sunday Times newspaper.

She is the author of several highly-acclaimed biographies, including those of Mary Wollstonecraft, Katherine Mansfield and Jane Austen.

Her 1990 account of Charles Dickens’ relationship with the actress Nelly Ternan, The Invisible Woman won several awards, while her biography of Samuel Pepys was named the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year. Her most recent book is Thomas Hardy’s The Time-Torn Man, which was shortlisted for the British Book Awards’ Biography of the Year.

Dr Tomalin is married to the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn, who is an alumnus and Honorary Fellow of Emmanuel College. The University conferred the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Letters upon Michael Frayn in 2001 and on Claire Tomalin in 2007.