Product Description

Thomas Hardy's novels are loved by millions of readers, but he was first and foremost a poet. He wrote around one thousand moving and deeply personal poems during his lifetime, tracing his experiences of life and love. This collection, selected and introduced by Claire Tomalin, Hardy's biographer, provides rich insight into Hardy's thoughts and emotions, and is central to the understanding of the man and his work. Divided into sections that move through the contours of Hardy's life - the English countryside in which he walked and the astonishing burst of creativity that followed the death of his estranged wife, Emma - this collection is essential for all those who love Hardy.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4350 in Books
• Published on: 2007-07-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 pages

Synopsis
Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. This seminal biography, by our leading biographer, covers Hardy's illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling novelist, and in later life, his supreme achievements as a poet.

About the Author
Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928) was an English poet, short-story writer and novelist. The son of a stonemason, he was born in Dorset. He was apprenticed to a local architect, and found initial success with Far from the Madding Crowd (1874). The same year he met and married Emma Gifford. Among his most famous works are The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891).

Customer Reviews

A well-paced introduction to Hardy's life.
It has been almost a year since I read this biography but I enjoyed it. I am not an expert on Hardy by any means and have not read any other accounts of his life although I have enjoyed reading both his novels and poems.
I appreciated the detailed construction of the society Hardy was born into. From the start we are aware of what type of family he was born into, the struggles he faced and his ambition to learn. The helpful map at the start demonstrates the extent to which Hardy's world was centred around a small patch of England. I also found Tomalin's accounts of Hardy's novels to be thoughtful, incisive and interesting. I have not read Desperate Remedies, but I will. Her analysis of his poetry is equally informative and astute. She is not afraid to criticise her subject, but is always aware of what he was aiming to write.
I would recommend this book highly to anyone who wants to enhance their knowledge of Hardy.

Warmly written, warmly recommended
As a teenager I found Thomas Hardy's major novels totally absorbing, his rural world totally different from the one I was growing up in, his characters totally engaging in their humility and their simplicity. Where Dickens seemed hard going (particularly "Hard Times", the first one we had foisted on us at school) and sometimes recklessly over the top, Hardy's gentle rustic realism always seemed that much more believable.

This flawlessly researched and meticulously written biography has taken me back to Hardy's world, all that stuff about the pathos underlying the grandeur and the grandeur underlying the pathos (I think that's how it was encapsulated somewhere...) The major novels will all have to be shifted on to the re-read pile now... But, as befits a biographical approach, it is Hardy the man who comes astonisinghly to life in these pages, and he comes over as a man racked with contradictions, a man who rose up above, even rebelled against, his humble background, and yet never quite forgave himself for doing so. A God-fearing atheist as well (in rather the same way in which Byron has been decribed as a revolutionary aristocrat). The only one of four children not to heed his mother's advice never to marry, remaining steadfastly loyal to his first wife while often cordially detesting her, and never quite coming to terms with the way he was, basically, manipulated into a second marriage by a woman nearly forty years his junior.

Claire Tomalin has already written critically acclaimed biographies of, among others, Shelley, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. Her style is smooth and polished, with just the odd surprising jagged edge sticking out, as when she gets on to "Jude The Obscure":

"Reading 'Jude' is like being hit in the face over and over again."

I well remember the unbearably depressing effect of reading "Jude", but I would never have expressed that effect with quite such a simile.

Tomalin also strikes me as rather too simplistic in her division of certain of the novels into "masterpieces" and "failures" (with "Two On A Tower", about which she seems unable to make up her mind, classed as an "interesting oddity").

After the scandalised reception of "Jude The Obscure" in 1895, Hardy turned definitively away from the novel and devoted the last thirty years of his life to poetry, new and old (some of it having been written many years prior to publication). Tomalin draws attention to the enormous variety to be found within the poetry, and singles out highly acclaimed poems such as "The Darkling Thrush" and "The Ruined Maid", a highly amusing dialogue between a naïve former acquaintance and a countrygirl-turned-harlot:

- 'Your hands were lke paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!' -
'We never do work when we're ruined,' said she.

The epilogue to the biography concentrates, unexpectedly, on the wrangling over where Hardy should be buried: with his family, as he had stipulated, or in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, as his influential friends thought appropriate (in brazen defiance of Hardy's own will and testament). The way the dispute was resolved is the most shocking revelation in the biography (and I still can't quite believe what I read in those final pages...)

I've always had reservations about biography, thinking that the life of a human being, especially a creative one, is so complex that any attempt to present it will either just scratch the surface or else be too obviously subjective in its approach - or even both. But this one has made me start to think otherwise. Tomalin is indeed, as one reviewer puts it, "the most empathetic of biographers", and I look forward to getting to know Jane Austen, and possibly Katherine Mansfield, in her genial company.

A good story
I borrowed this from my friend earlier this year and finished it last month on a trip to Dorset. I read Robert Gittings' two-volume biography of Hardy a long time ago, so the story of his remarkable life and his two contrasting marriages was familiar to me, but it was good to hear about these things again. Claire Tomalin has an easy style which occasionally slips into the second person as she suggests to the reader what "you" might have thought had you been there, but she's also worked hard at her research and brings up some interesting snippets. For example, at one point she notes that Hardy was friends with Bertrand Russell's aunt, and wonders what each would have made of the other had they met. She also gives a memorable vignette from (one of) Hardy's funerals, which was probably the only occasion on which Kipling and Shaw met.

But - as others have pointed out - it's Tomalin's treatment of the poetry that takes up most of her attention. The tale of how his guilt and regret at his first wife's death found its expression in a large collection of extraordinary poetry (which profoundly unsettled his second wife) is a distinctive one, and is worth telling in detail, but I'd've liked more attention paid to his novels. These - I think - are the route through which most readers encounter Hardy but unfortunately, she seems to lose interest in them as she goes through his life; certainly the treatment of his later books - which are far more important - is more cursory than the account she gives of the earlier ones.