Yet at the same time, the first stirrings of what would become Virginia Woolf’s stream-of-consciousness are also found in Austen’s novels she invented a new semaphore for signaling a person’s thought as it is happening. From her, Forster learned that characters do not have to change to be real they must merely reveal more of their stable essences as the novel progresses. From her, Dickens learned that characters can survive on one attribute and still be fat with life. She founded character and caricature at the same time, which is the essentially satirical, essentially English approach to fictional people.

She is Vice-President of the Royal Society of Literature and of the English PEN (International PEN).English fiction flows from Jane Austen’s pelisse as surely as Russian fiction does from Gogol’s overcoat. Her second husband is the novelist and playwright Michael Frayn. She married her first husband, Nicholas Tomalin, who was a prominent journalist but who was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973. In addition, her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book Award in 2002, the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize in 2003, the Latham Prize of the Samuel Pepys Club in 2003, and was also shortlisted for the Samuel Johnson Prize in 2003. She has written several noted biographies and her work has been recognised with the award of the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize and the 1991 Hawthornden Prize for 'The Invisible Woman The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens'. She became literary editor of the 'New Statesman' and also the 'Sunday Times'. She married her first husband, Nicholas Tomalin, who was a prominent journalist but who was killed in the Arab-Israeli Yo Born Claire Delavenay in London, she was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Born Claire Delavenay in London, she was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge.

Jane austen a life claire tomalin