Product Description

Few writers are as strongly associated with a particular place as Thomas Hardy. His role as unofficial historian of Wessex has come to define his reputation, yet only hints at the complexities of a man who cultivated aristocratic friends, spent several months each year in London and wrote some of the most popular, but also most vilified, novels of the Victorian period.

In The Guarded Life, Ralph Pite explores these contradictions in the context of Hardy’s relationships with women, friends and mentors; the social, family and work pressures he experienced; and his attachment to the Dorsetshire landscape. In doing so, he reveals the personal and emotional life of a public figure who has, despite his fame, remained largely obscure – until now.

‘Pite uses new critical techniques and perspectives to make his point... He is a subtle reader of Hardy’s work and applies his impressive reasoning to the man as if he, too, were a kind of text’ Daily Telegraph

‘An impressive, and impressively human, book, Pite’s skill is in balancing the larger sweep of Hardy’s life with a sense for what happened at the edges. Like his subject, Pite takes risks with what he reveals, but the detail is always enlarging. Hardy, and his times, seem bigger for this work’ New Statesman

‘In portraits, Hardy habitually looks downwards or aside, avoiding direct contact. In this biography, Pite has caught his subject’s eyes and held his gaze’ The Times

‘Pite is skilful, not to say ingenious, in drawing together emblems and instances of secrecy... This new biography encourages us to re-examine Hardy’s life as a complex and often self-contradictory whole; Pite`s Hardy is altogether more vulnerable than Hardy`s version of himself, but also more likeable’ Guardian

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1211703 in Books
• Published on: 2007-05-04
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.57" h x 7.60" w x 5.16" l, .84 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 544 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* Pite bases this revisionist biography of Hardy on his reinterpretation of the novelist's autobiographical Life. Widely regarded as a work of candor, Hardy's Life turns out be an artful fiction. As deftly as he created Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Clym Yeobright, and other characters, Hardy turned his autobiographical self into a dignified stoic, born to be a great poet, so denying his readers access to the tempestuous realities of his formative years. Through careful research and close readings of Hardy's work, Pite recovers the psychological confusion that Hardy sought--with astonishing success--to keep out of the public eye. Pite reveals, for instance, that the youthful rejection of Christianity that Hardy depicts in his Life as the foregone conclusion of a tough-minded intellect was actually an emotionally wrenching process. Similarly, whereas the Hardy of the Life responds to hostile criticism with philosophical detachment, the real Hardy recoiled into self-doubt. The maturing writer whom Pite exposes looks quite unlike the godlike sage of the Life, yet Hardy's own novels and poetry foster compassion for the painfully fractured personality Hardy tried to mask. A valuable complement to Tomalin's 2006 life of Hardy: Tomalin illuminating the hard-won authorial poise of Hardy's late verse, Pite plumbing the long-hidden tempests of the younger soul. Bryce Christensen
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About the Author

Ralph Pite teaches English at Cardiff University. He has published a critical study of Hardy (Hardy’s Geography, Palgrave, 2002), a book about Dante’s influence on Romantic Poetry (The Circle of Our Vision, OUP, 1994), and a biographical account of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Lives of the Great Romantics: Coleridge, Pickering & Chatto, 1997). He is currently working on modern poetry, environmentalism and ideas of the simple life.