Claire Tomalin (née Delavenay; born 20 June 1933) is an English journalist and biographer known for her biographies of Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Samuel Pepys, Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Tomalin was born Claire Delavenay on 20 June 1933 in London, the daughter of English composer Muriel Herbert and French academic Émile Delavenay.

[4] She has served on the Committee of the London Library, and as a Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery and the Wordsworth Trust.

[7] He was killed while reporting on the Arab-Israeli Yom Kippur War in 1973.

She worked in publishing and journalism as literary editor of the New Statesman, then The Sunday Times, while bringing up her children.