RENOWNED author Claire Tomalin confessed she had secretly been house hunting in Winchester while researching her book on Jane Austen a decade ago.

She declared that she had grown to love the city when she returned to the Guildhall on January 13 to talk about her remarkably frank memoir, A Life of My Own.

Claire was aided in this by inquisitor John Miller, from Alresford, himself no slouch when it comes to writing biographies of the great and the good.

A prolific writer, Miss Tomalin has written no fewer than nine biographies, including those of Shelley, Dickens and Hardy, and now her own life story has aroused enormous interest.

Her parents separated when she was just six and she spent her formative years in boarding schools. They were good schools and she went up to Cambridge to read English.

A frustrated historian, she revels in immersing herself in the lives of those that she documents. She was even advised to follow in the footsteps of those she studied on horseback, to gain a better insight into life in the 18th Century.

Married young, her children were born in quick succession, one with spina bifida, and she struggled to bring up a young family with an absentee husband, Nick Tomalin, who she describes as ‘a bit of a bolter’. He encouraged her to write her first book – before he took off with yet another paramour – and was killed while reporting for the Sunday Times on the Golan Heights.

Needing a steady income to support her family, Claire became literary editor of the New Statesman and in 1979 became literary editor of the Sunday Times, walking out with her entire department when the move to Wapping became so toxic.

Two of Miss Tomalin’s most influential books were on women who had previously been unseen.

The Invisible Woman was about Dickens’ secret lover, Nelly Ternan, while Mrs Jordan’s Profession was about an actress who was the mistress of King William IV, who bore him 10 children.

Her biography of Samuel Pepys won the Whitbread Book of the Year Award (in competition with her second husband, playwright and novelist Michael Frayn) and brought great acclaim and she delighted in steeping herself in his writings. Indeed, her own writings – her letters to her father – became the source material for the early years of her autobiography, as she had found them after he died at the age of 98.

When asked if she felt more French than English (she was born in France to a French father and English mother), she declared that she was “a European” which brought much applause from her delighted audience.

Thanking Miss Tomalin for an inspiring evening, Liz Cooper, chairman of Home-Start Winchester (which covers Alresford), also thanked sponsors Dutton Gregory Solicitors who had supported the evening to help raise funds for the family support charity.