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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 921
Format: Bargain Price
Label: Penguin Press HC, The
Manufacturer: Penguin Press HC, The
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 512
Printing Date: January 18, 2007
Publishing house: Penguin Press HC, The
Release Date: January 11, 2007
Sale Popularity Level: 148336
Studio: Penguin Press HC, The
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“A masterful portrait” (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award–winning biographer
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.
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Rated by buyers 
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Excellent price. I ordered one for a friend and had it sent to her as well as myself. We both got our books quickly, in perfect condition.
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Thomas Hardy's fame today, almost 70 years after his death, rests on great novels like THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE, TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES and THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE. It is thus surprising to learn from biographer Claire Tomalin that he considered himself mainly a poet who wrote novels only for the money. Taking him at his word, Tomalin devotes major attention throughout her book to how his poetry reflects the twists and turns of his career, the people he knew and loved (or disliked) and the places he visited.
Tomalin has been involved in British literary journalism for many years. A few years ago she wrote an engrossing book about Ellen Ternan, the young actress with whom Charles Dickens carried on a secret affair toward the end of his life. Her study of Hardy also looks at her subject's private life, but she functions also as a literary critic, subjecting Hardy's novels, poetry, short stories and other writings to a good deal of clear-eyed and fair-minded critical appraisal. The book, however, gets off to a slow start. She takes a chapter or two to find the right biographical voice, but once she has found it, she uses it skillfully indeed.
What readers are likely to find new in her book is its detailed attention to Hardy's poetry. He wrote over a thousand poems, many of them closely reflecting his life experience, and Tomalin's text is sprinkled liberally with samples. Read purely as poetry they are mostly excellent, but as here skillfully related to the events that prompted them, they take on even greater interest. On the evidence of this book, Hardy seems woefully underrepresented in most anthologies of British poetry.
Hardy was born in 1840 to a family of humble construction workers in Dorset on the channel coast of England southwest of London. He seemed headed for a humdrum career in architecture until he got the writing bug and produced a controversial novel that no publisher would touch. He was, however, sufficiently encouraged to keep at it, and the publication of DESPERATE REMEDIES in 1871 began his career's upward climb. He never attended a university, married the daughter of a country clergyman and was only gradually accepted by the class-conscious English society of his time. As his fame slowly grew, his marriage soured, and by the time Emma Hardy died in 1912, the couple was living as if separated even though they resided in the same house (Tomalin calls the situation one of "mutual incomprehension"). Emma complained in a letter that "he understands only the women he invents --- the others not at all." Hardy's second marriage, to a young admirer, seems in Tomalin's rendering to have been not much more successful --- Florence Hardy comes across as temperamental, easily offended and generally troublesome.
Hardy also lost his Christian faith, a fact that may be reflected in the bleak emotional landscape of his later novels, whose characters struggle, usually vainly, against malignant natural and cultural forces they cannot control. Yet Hardy characteristically continued to attend church services now and then, explaining lamely that it was good for people "to get clean and come together once a week." The man Hardy, Tomalin says, was "hard to know."
Once Hardy became "seriously rich" and famous, he took to enjoying high life among England's literary and social elite. He always insisted that he be buried in his beloved Dorset rather than in Westminster Abbey, but his friends overruled him after his death and there was a full-dress Westminster burial of his ashes, with A. E. Houseman, Kipling, Shaw and Galsworthy among the pallbearers. His heart, however, was very first removed and buried in his hometown of Dorchester. Even in death, Hardy managed to have the best of both of his worlds.
--- Reviewed by Robert Finn
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As a Thomas Hardy fans, I was thrilled when I saw that Claire Tomalin had followed her l997 biography of Jane Austen with this book. I enjoyed Jane Austen: A Life and had positive expectations of the new book; these were more than fulfilled. I find this book even better than the first.
Ms Tomalin writes well and is very thorough, making good use of sources available to her. I don't know if it was that she had more sources available to her this time, but her thoroughness seemed less nitpicky (she is never pedantic)is somewhow than it sometimes appeared in the earlier work. When she gives--parenthetically--the actual number of the very first phone the Hardy's acquired, it is a sort of bonus rather than a filler. Hardy may have been a drab little man--as some contemporaries described him--but her description is not drab reading; it is compelling and enlightening, making one's joy in his work even greater than it already was. I am more familiar with his prose than with his poetry, and I particularly appreiated he use of his poems to illustrate aspects of his life and relationships. Ms Tomalin has done a truly lovely job of making me more familiar with my two favorite authors.
Rated by buyers 
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No biography by Claire Tomalin can be anything less than interesting and readable, but unfortunately after her superior efforts on the lives of Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys in recent years Tomalin has produced a biography that is neither very needed nor one of her better efforts. Few of the great English writers have a life already better chronicled than Hardy, given the recent excellent biographical study by Millgate (not to mention the two-volume autobiography Hardy himself produced late in life and had published posthumously as a "biography" under the name of his second wife Florence). Tomalin's room to make a new mark here is thus very limited, and she does so by emphasizing his poetry, his relations with his very first wife Emma, and by engaging in some very bizarre speculation based on the few areas in Hardy's life where we have very little evidence. Where such speculation was necessary for her lives of Austen and Pepys (given the comparative paucity of supporting materials about their lives, and, in Austen's case, of first-hand documentation of her subject's life), it seems perverse when dealing with a life so thoroughly documented both by Hardy himself and by those who knew them. In one instance, she proposes that because the name of Abel Whittle is THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE is also the name of a Dorset man who was a contemporary of Hardy's mother Jemima, that this might mean that Hardy collaborated with the plot of that novel with his mother--a highly dubious speculation.
Tomalin is on much more solid ground when she talks about Hardy's famous deteriorating relationship with his odd lonely wife Emma, who grew to loathe her husband in her later years and to document that hatred in great detail in her journals. Emma Hardy emerges as a much more distinct character in this work than does the droll, controlling Hardy or his frustrated second wife Florence, and again it might have been better had Tomalin stuck more to the facts to give a fuller portrait of her three main figures. The biography is also oddly too short, given the length of Hardy's life: odd details, like his brief meeting with the Prince of Wales in the twenties, whereas his relations with other writers (such as E. M. Forster) are given in barely any of the space they deserve. And at times Tomalin does not seem to have taken her narrative through the requisite drafts she might have: for example, midway through one paragraph she suddenly begins to describe in great detail a vitriolic attack Emma Hardy directed against Hardy's sister Mary without any explanation whatsoever of what prompted the tirade. Hardy's life was too rich, and Tomalin too good of a writer, for this book to be unreadable or uninteresting, but given her achievements with her biographies of Austen, Pepys, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others this book comes as a big let-down.
Rated by buyers -
This was a very well-written biography and fulfilled my expectations of Claire Tomalin. It was brisk and readable, and very interesting to the point that I read through the footnotes after finishing the book. I have read many of Hardy's novels but never his poetry, and never a bio of him before. I found this book to be very interesting but it left me with the impression that I need to read earlier Hardy bios by Millgate and others to get a full picture of Thomas Hardy. I think it is a good overview of the man and a great introductory point for deeper study.
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