All Sorts of Merit: Celebrating Durham’s Professor Claire Harman

By Catalina Ronzon

It took Professor Claire Harman years to put the word “writer” on her passport forms. 

“I thought it was a bit pretentious,” she says in a 2015 interview posted on National Poetry Day’s YouTube channel. “How many books do you have to publish before you can call yourself a writer? And obviously, you can publish no books and call yourself a writer, but I didn’t feel that I could do that.” 

When we ask how and when this changed for her, the professor hesitates. On the other end of our video call –all the way in Oxfordshire— she sits in a brightly lit, inviting space, with a backdrop consisting almost entirely of books. “I had published four by the time I felt I could call myself a writer,” she shares, looking pensive. “I think it took a certain public recognition.”

Known for being humble and unaffected, Professor Harman does not appear to take pleasure in being fussed over. Possibly to reduce the discomfort of being spotlighted, she jokes: “Perhaps when I was invited to enough literary festivals!”Despite her insistence on downplaying her own achievements, we soon learn that Professor Harman has always been a writer. Born in Guildford to teacher parents, she describes her early years as “vanilla”, and her overall childhood as a “struggle against blandness”.

Sometimes I feel like one of those monkeys writing Shakespeare!

“When I was a… Little person,” she elaborates, in reference to this period, “I was actually making small physical books, sowing the pages together. I was obsessed with stories – adventure stories, really. My life and upbringing were kind of boring and routine: we lived in a house of the type 95% of British people live, in the south of England. The south of England, for Heaven’s sake. I should have liked to be –I don’t know— Scottish, or anything else that might have made one a little more original.” 

She tells us literature became “quite exciting” for her, in this context: “I think being a reader is just as momentous as being a writer,” she continues. 

For some time during her teenage years, Professor Harman wanted to be a doctor. It was her love of reading –and specifically, of reading poetry— that encouraged her to change course and pursue an arts route. She read English at Manchester, where she would eventually lecture. She has also worked at Oxford, Columbia, and now Durham. Before teaching and writing professionally, however, Professor Harman started out in publishing: specifically, Carcanet Press, as well as the Manchester-based poetry magazine PN Review. She became a mother at a young age, and raised her family while developing her career as a freelance writer.

Professor Harman’s first venture into literary biography, for which she won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize for ‘a writer of growing stature’ under the age of 35, was published in 1989. Written over the course of seven years, it recounts the life of novelist, poet, and subversive queer communist Sylvia Townsend-Warner. 

“I ended up writing biography sort of by accident, really” she tells us. “The Townsend-Warner book was the first one I was offered a contract for.”

But while chance and circumstance might have played a role in her professional trajectory, one also gets a sense of order and intention:

“Writing has been the way I’ve had of experiencing consistent growth, and of feeling like myself,” the professor says, going on to share how she has experimented with many different genres: including radio plays, screen plays, and even a libretto, written in blank verse and based on R.L. Stevenson’s Treasure Island – her “favourite” writing project to date.

“The world of what one is writing,” Professor Harman reflects, “is much more controllable than the outside world.” 

After the Townsend-Warner biography, Professor Harman would go on to immortalise the lives of several literary figures: Fanny Burney (2000), Robert Louis Stevenson (2005), Jane Austen (2009), Charlotte Brontë (2015); and, most recently, Katherine Mansfield (2023). Of these, the Charlotte Brontë volume is the one she is most proud of. Professor Harman says she likes to write about artists whose work has “affected” her in some way, and these have mostly been writers. She is also the author of Murder By The Book: A Sensational Chapter in Victorian Crime (2018): a gripping dissection of a real-life Victorian murder in which the killer was inspired by a novel. Her biographical work has been hailed as ‘innovative’, ‘vivid’, ‘moving’, ‘elegant’, ‘perceptive’; and the professor herself as a ‘superlative storyteller.’ 

Professor Harman contributes regularly to the literary press, including the Times Literary Supplement, Literary Review, Evening Standard, and the Sunday Telegraph. Her own short fiction has been awarded the V.S. Pritchett Memorial Prize and the Tom-Gallon award. Furthermore, she is a poet, and in 2015 received the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem for her The Mighty Hudson. In the National Poetry Day interview conducted shortly after, she remarks that a poem is simultaneously “the most forgiving and the most demanding thing to write”. When we ask which genre she feels most comfortable writing in, or which –if any— feels most authentic to her, Professor Harman answers immediately: “definitely poetry.”

I ended up writing biography sort of by accident, really

In an acknowledgement of her contributions to the literary world, she was made a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2006. She also held the role of President in The Alliance of Literary Societies from 2016 to 2021, and is a judge on the J.R. Ackerley Prize for autobiography and memoir.

As well as being commendably humble, Professor Harman has a great capacity for humour: “Sometimes I feel like one of those monkeys writing Shakespeare!” she laughs. “There’s a lot of that when it comes to writing: if you keep at it for long enough, honing the craft, something not too bad ends up coming out.”

Her best writing advice? “Remember what you are trying to convey, and have that be something that is worth saying, sincere, and not cooked up.”

Speech consistently interspersed with ingenious English wit, Professor Harman is known among her students for being quick, eloquent, and more than a little sarcastic. In conversation, her gaze is serene, though sharp; sometimes almost hawk-like; often ironic; and always kind. Perhaps it is the “biographer’s eye”, meaning one that has been trained to scan for information and pick up on subtleties while remaining empathetic. Or maybe this is our own bias because we know she’s a biographer. But, respected though she is for her sense of humour, it is Professor Harman’s generous and encouraging disposition that most stands out to her students, who describe her as “caring”, “humble” and “very sweet”. “She’s a really decent person, and a wonderful professor,” comments one. “Her manner of teaching is very elegant,” contributes another. A third adds: “she is so articulate: she just has this presence that makes you want to listen.” “Fun” and “very personable” are other descriptors used. “She treats people like they’re interesting.”

There are no boring lives, only boring biographers, and the disjointed fragments of an interesting life are but lost to time without the intervention of a skilled storyteller

When we ask her what she finds most rewarding about teaching here at Durham, Professor Harman replies: “Definitely reading students’ work. You get tremendous fresh insights into people. It’s really lovely to be in the company of young, ambitious and talented individuals.”

She is also highly appreciative of her colleagues, adding that being “somewhere like Durham, where the rest of the teaching staff is so remarkably good, is a real treat.” 

And the worst part about the job? “Getting there on the train,” she confesses with a smile.

In a quote attributed to Pablo Picasso, he tells a young artist: “inspiration exists, but it has to find you working.” Professor Harman’s career is in many ways a testament to this notion. Her biographies are meticulously researched: so much so that the reader might pause to wonder how on Earth she found the time to investigate not one, but seven lives in such depth. She handles her subjects’ storylines with dignity and care, knowing how to place herself in the sidelines and let the facts do the talking, while at the same time adroitly managing to weave her own style and wit into each work. She makes herself invisible, yet remains present.

There are no boring lives, only boring biographers, and the disjointed fragments of an interesting life are but lost to time without the intervention of a skilled storyteller: one with enough passion and creativity to weave them all together into an adventure worth retelling. The facts are the seeds; the narrator, the hand that cares for them: watering, pruning, harvesting. Tended to with sufficient dexterity, sprouts flourish and reach their full potential. So, congratulations, Professor Harman, for a beautiful garden, and may you keep growing it for many years to come.

 ** All Sorts of Lives has been named The Sunday Times’ Literary Book of the Year 2023; as well as included among Waterstone’s Top 50 & The Independent’s Top 25 Books of the Year. Buy on paperback now! **

Image: Jeff Morgan 04 via Alamy Stock Photo