Claire Tomalin is best known for a series of acclaimed biographies of Mary Wollstonecraft, Mrs Jordan, Katherine Mansfield, Dickens's mistress Nelly Ternan and, most recently, Jane Austen. But she has also worked as a publisher, critic and journalist, and she reviews and broadcasts collected here are from three decades as a literary journalist. Their subjects range from women's history to modern fiction, letters and biographies of the great - Dickens, Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath - to more obscure but no less intriguing figures such as Dame Ethel Smyth ("Ancient Mariner" and "Belle Dame Sans Merci" rolled into one) and Edith Nesbit, who managed to keep three households going and to write some of the richest and most long-lasting children's books. In three introductory essays to the main sections of the book, Claire Tomalin describes her own career, which began in London during the fifties and included a period as literary editor of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, at a time when both of these papers were particularly vibrant and creative. The result is a vivid portrait of the literary scene over those decades and also a candid account of a woman's professional life - how it began in the male-dominated workplace of London publishing, and how family demands and circumstances propelled and shaped it. In the first essay Claire Tomalin notes that Jane Austen wrote "Seven years...are enough to change every pore of one's skin, and every feeling of one's mind". "Several Strangers" characteristically combines a personal openness with a wide range of literary sympathies to portray the development of a literary career and a continuing fascination with books and writers.