Claire Tomalin, (June 20, 1933) the British editor, and biographer, has been married to the playright Michael Frayn, her second husband, since 1993. Her busy and much awarded career includes being literary editor of the Sunday Times from 1979 to 1986, and a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery from 1992 to 2002. Among her books we note Katherine Mansfield: a secret life, (1987), and Samuel Pepys: the unequalled self, (2002) , which won the Whitbread Prize. Her biography of Hardy, Thomas Hardy: the time-torn man, (2006), includes this lovely detail,:
Florence Dugdale, in November 1910, was Hardy's assistant, not yet his wife. She objected to a line in a poem, a poem about the death of the cat, which describes the cat as the writer's only friend. Claire Tomalin describes this exchange --
"When she objected that the cat was not by any means his only friend, he explained that he was 'not exactly writing about himself but about some imaginary man in a similar situation.'"
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