The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy


Book Description

One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography. But this is not the whole truth: Florence altered much of what Hardy meant to appear in his 'biography'. Through careful examination of pre- publication texts, Michael Millgate has retrieved the text as it stood at the time of Hardy's final revision. For the first time The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy can be read as a true work of autobiography - an addition to the Hardy canon.







Thomas Hardy


Book Description

"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.




The Life of Thomas Hardy


Book Description

Born the son of a village stonemason and a cook, Hardy made himself the best-known English author of his day. Outwardly uneventful, his personal life was interesting chiefly as raw material for his writings.




The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891


Book Description

The first volume (1928) of a fascinating account of Hardy's life, compiled by him in collaboration with his second wife.




Thomas Hardy


Book Description

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was a major English poet and novelist; his works, often set in the fictional county of Wessex, are memorable for their realism and criticism of social constraints. This book, the first volume of a two volume selected collection of his works, includes ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’, ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, ‘Far From the Madding Crowd’, ‘The Return of the Native’, ‘The Trumpet-Major’ and ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’.




Thomas Hardy


Book Description

Thomas Hardy in the Literary Lives series relates Hardy's life to his career as a writer, giving particular attention to his determination as a young man to make literature his career, his methodical preparation during the first thirty years of his life for that career, the writing of his fourteen published novels and the fame they brought him, and then, the culmination of his life as writer, his emergence in his remaining thirty years as one of the very greatest of English poets and the writer of The Dynasts.




Thomas Hardy


Book Description

Acknowledgements -- Index




Woman Much Missed


Book Description

'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...' After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Hardy's works available in Penguin Classics are A Laodicean, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, Selected Poems, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Pursuit of the Well-beloved and The Well-beloved, The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, The Withered Arm and Other Stories, The Woodlanders, Two on a Tower and Under the Greenwood Tree.




Thomas Hardy


Book Description

The Guarded Life challenges some of the long-held views of Hardy - did he spend all his early life in preparation for his career as a writer, and did his novels really come a distant second to his poetry in his heart? In his personal life, did his first wife, Emma Hardy, really trick him into marriage and was she the ambitious women her enemies have painted her as being? And what of Florence, his second wife, who has so often been caricatured in her conflicted and passionate feelings for Hardy? By examining the relationships and contexts that shaped Hardy most - the women, the friendships and mentors, the social and family pressures, the career structures and the Dorsetshire landscape - The Guarded Life reveals the personality and emotional life of a public figure who has despite his fame remained until now largely obscure.