Hello, I'm Kirstie Young and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive for

rights reasons we've had to shorten the music.

The program was originally broadcast in the year 2000 and the presenter was Sue Lolley.

My cast away this week is a writer. Her work has matured with her life from clever

Cambridge graduate through motherhood and a highly successful journalistic career to her position

today as the respected author of literary and historical biography. All this has been

accompanied by personal tragedy. Two of her children died and her first husband was killed

in the Yom Kippur War. Her work has triumphed. Her first book about the 18th century feminist

Mary Wollstonecraft won a wit-bred prize and more prizes and literary acclaim have come

with subsequent ones. Writing books, she says, is mostly sweat, pain and panic. You sink

down into the mud until you feel you know enough to start. She is Claire Tomelin. So, where's

the fun, Claire? Where's the excitement that redeems the toil?

Well, the fun is the research. A book starts because you're curious about something.

And you want to explore it. And you set off on this journey and it's very often a journey

in England because England is full of old papers, people living in houses and various distant

parts of the country with boxes of old papers under their bed. You're like a detective.

And I had one wonderful incident when I cracked very, very carefully and finally thought

there might be some letters in some remote part of the country and wrote and got a letter

saying, if I cared to visit them, I could sit in the estate office and read them.

You're not saying who this is about? No, I'm not allowed to say who this is about because

I promised I wouldn't and you will see why. I sat in the estate office and then a message

came to me that there was a member of the family and elderly lady in, as it were, one

...