Thomas Hardy

by Claire Tomalin

Overview

"A masterful portrait" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographer, and author of A Life of My Own.  

The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101201923
Publisher:	Penguin Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/18/2007
Sold by:	Penguin Group
Format:	eBook
Pages:	512
File size:	2 MB
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Claire Tomalin is the author of eight highly acclaimed biographies, including Thomas Hardy and Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, which won the 2002 Whitbread Book of the Year Award. She has previously won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography, the Whitbread First Novel Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award for Non-Fiction, and the Whitbread Biography Award. Educated at Cambridge University, she served as literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday Times (London). Claire Tomalin lives in London and is married to the playwright Michael Frayn.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements     vii
List of Illustrations     xi
Map: showing the area around Higher Bockhampton and Max Gate     xiv
Prologue     xvii
1840-1867
Mother     3
Child     18
The Bookish Boy     31
Friends and Brothers     46
The Londoner     63
1867-1874
The Clever Lad's Dream     87
Lyonnesse     99
The True Vocation     112
Easy to Die     126
A Short Visit to the Continent     141
1875-1905
Dreaming the Heath     163
Hardy Joins a Club     175
The Tower     188
The Conformers     200
The Blighted Star     218
Tom and Em     233
The Terra-cotta Dress     245
A Witch and a Wife     263
Cat, Bird, Eagle, Sphinx     279
1905-1928
Convergence     297
Satires of Circumstance     312
A Friend from Cambridge     326
The Wizard     339
Winter Words     358
Epilogue     370
List of Abbreviations     381
Notes     383
Bibliography     453
Text and Illustration Permissions     462
Index     465

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"[An] excellent new biography." —-The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Editorial Reviews

This is the triumph of the biographer's art, of which Tomalin is a master: to be absolutely true to the last scrap of fact-that is, never to embellish or contort those facts-yet to create something utterly new and undreamt of, something more than the mere sum of those facts.

Chicago Tribune

… Tomalin comes through, recounting Hardy’s life with the amiable authority of a 19th-century novelist, unafraid of gentle, but firm, pronouncements (“Like most people, he gave different accounts of what he believed at different times”). She has visited each important locale of Hardy’s life, noticing the large and seemingly simple things academic scholars often miss: “Most of his characters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain.” This is an observation that helps readers to square the circle of recognitions, to remember Hardy as a writer whose books they would once finish with the sudden need to get up from the chair and out of the house, to walk, alone, filled with the ancient surefire feelings of pity and fear.
— The New York Times

Thomas Mallon

Though there are objective ways to measure literary accomplishment, they fall far short of the scientific and ultimately are subjective. What matters most about Tomalin's biography is the care with which she traces all of Hardy's writing to its roots in his own life. Her study reminds us that though a knowledge of a writer's life is unnecessary to an appreciation of his or her work, that knowledge can help us understand that work and its sources.
— The Washington Post

Jonathan Yardley

Another wonderfully readable life by veteran biographer and journalist Tomalin (Samuel Pepys, 2002, etc.). She always builds a good story, and this slow but touching biography of the mild-mannered provincial architect from Dorchester who created seething novels about inequity and thwarted ambition is no exception. Tomalin begins at the death in 1912 of Hardy's once-beloved first wife Emma, from whom he grew estranged in their last years; evidently he began to compose poetry seriously at this juncture as a way of revisiting their romance and his early life. Born in 1840 to a domestic servant who had to hurry up and get married before his birth, Hardy later became aware that he was an unwanted child whose existence stunted his mother's chances of bettering herself. He served as an apprentice to an architect in Dorchester, then quit to seek his literary fortunes in London, attending reform meetings and making publishing contacts. After marrying wellborn Cornishwoman Emma Gifford, he settled back in Dorset to build his own house and live quietly among the laboring villagers. The humiliating rejection of his early novels rankled, and for many years after he finally got published, it was in serial form for quick money, much like Dickens and Eliot. Far from the Madding Crowd, which delineated the grim rural life that Hardy knew intimately, made his reputation as a socialist, feminist and gorgeous describer of nature. Hardy's worldview grew more pessimistic, "marked by a fierce questioning of accepted ideas about society," and it is evidenced in works including The Return of the Native, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Hardy's bleak rewrite of the Book of Job, Jude theObscure. Tomalin thoughtfully considers these works, and the poignant marriage of Hardy to Em, in a text brimming with insight. A richly introspective biography sure to rekindle interest in Hardy's writing.

Kirkus Reviews

Longtime friends who regarded Thomas Hardy as a ‘sphinx-like’ riddle would marvel at how fully a twenty-first-century biographer illuminates the Victorian writer's tangled life.”

Booklist (starred review)

[An] excellent new biography.

The New York Times Sunday Book Review

Tomalin brings…the skills of an experienced and accomplished biographer…and the confidence of a deeply informed literary critic.”

Washington Post

"A masterful portrait.”

Philadelphia Inquirer

"A fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology."
-The New York Times

"Admirable . . . One returns to Thomas Hardy with renewed pleasure and surprise."
-The New York Review of Books

"Tomalin brings . . . the skills of an experienced and accomplished biographer . . . and the confidence of a deeply informed literary critic."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post

From the Publisher