Product Description

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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #107831 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-26
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Binding: Audio CD
• 6 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Respected British biographer Tomalin (whose Samuel Pepys was 2002's Whitbread Book of the Year) sticks to the substantiated facts of Hardy's life (1840–1928) in her finely honed biography, dismissing the speculative claims of other Hardy scholars as she charts the great British novelist and poet's rise from humble rural origins to bestselling author and literary eminence. Tomalin captures the awkwardness of Hardy's conduct in high society following his literary success, brilliantly highlighting the snobbishly mocking diary entries of upper-class observers. At the heart of Tomalin's narrative is a gripping account of Hardy's long, troubled marriage to Emma Gifford in which Tomalin carefully shows how a heady courtship waned into disappointment and bitterness on both sides. Tomalin damns neither party, evoking Emma's eccentricities and frustrations along with Hardy's infatuations with other women. She also treats, with great sensitivity and insight, Hardy's poetic outpourings after Emma's death, in which he imaginatively returned to an image of her as his beloved muse. "The wounds inflicted by life never quite healed over in Hardy," writes Tomalin, although she avows she cannot completely fathom the underlying cause of his acute sensitivity to humiliation. A feat of distillation and mature judgment, Tomalin's biography artfully presents Hardy in his intimate and social world, offering succinct and insightful readings of his work along the way. Illus., map. (Jan. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* 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. In a struggling young London architect, Tomalin discerns the nascent impulses that finally coalesced in powerful novels and exceptional poetry. Readers see how that art challenged a self-confident age's orthodoxies, as Hardy distilled his rage against social injustice into imagery of rare resonance. Tomalin acknowledges that Hardy's rage occasionally carried him into bottomless despair (manifest particularly in Jude the Obscure). Yet even as she criticizes an authorial fury that weakens several narratives, Tomalin highly praises the creative poise with which Hardy transmutes turbulent emotions into mature poetry. Through the adamantine discipline of verse, an aging man converts grief at his wife's death into poignant elegies, memorializes the painful loss of childhood faith, and plumbs the cruel mystery of time. A balanced assessment highlights the brilliance of "The Darkling Thrush," but also exposes the wooden awkwardness of The Dynasts.Yet even a literary mastery that culminates in magical epiphanies cannot shield Hardy from the posthumous travesty of his farcical double funerals, here recounted in depressing detail. A priceless resource for the general reader and the Victorian scholar. Bryce Christensen
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Claire Tomalin has worked in publishing and journalism most of her life. She was literary editor first of the New Statesman and then the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is the author of seven highly acclaimed biographies: The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize; Shelley and His World; Katherine Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which won the Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography; Mrs Jordan's Profession; Jane Austen: A Life; and, in 2002, Pepys: The Unequalled Self, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year. She has also published a collection of her literary journalism entitled Several Strangers: Writings from Three Decades.