Product Description

“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.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #297598 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 512 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 The Washington Post
Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley

In the summer of 1926, Thomas Hardy was visited at his house in Dorset by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, she being "the daughter of his old editor Leslie Stephen." Hardy, Claire Tomalin reports in this new biography, had read nothing of hers, although she had published several novels, most recently Mrs. Dalloway. Neither of the Woolfs was offended by this. Instead, both came away charmed by "his freedom, ease and vitality," Virginia wrote in her diary, and a year and a half later, not long after Hardy's death, Leonard published a tribute to him and his work, which he summarized as "in the full English tradition, solid works built about a story, in which, on the face of it, character, humour, description of scenery, criticism of life, philosophy, all have their place, but to which they are accessory," a body of work that added up to "a great novel and a great work of art." As to the man himself:

"This impression of simplicity and of something which is almost the opposite of simplicity was the strongest impression which I got from Hardy personally. At first sight, and when he began to talk to you, you might have thought that he was merely one of many men born in English villages. But he is one of the few people who have left upon me the personal impression of greatness. I saw him . . . in the house which he had built for himself at Dorchester, and which, with its sombre growth of trees, seemed to have been created by him as if it were one of his poems translated into brick, furniture and vegetation. He talked about his poems, and London as he had known it in his youth, and about his dog 'Wessex', all with great charm and extraordinary simplicity. He was a human being, not 'the great man.' "

It is one of the many strengths of Claire Tomalin's biography that she conveys in full Hardy's simple humanity. Obviously he was not a simple man as the term is ordinarily used -- indeed, the days of his long life were filled with complexity -- but he retained to the end an almost childlike fascination with and love for the quotidian world, which no doubt goes a long way toward explaining why, eight decades after his death, his work remains beloved and widely read. His novels and poems fall in and out of literary fashion, but they never fall out of print. He was not an unduly graceful prose stylist, and he tended to throw more into a novel than it could sustain, but, as Tomalin writes, his work is "full of curious and arresting perceptions, sublime moments, wilful and tragic men and women who impose themselves by their originality and their vivid human presence."

Hardy's life story has been written many times -- by Michael Millgate and Ralph Pite most recently -- and Hardy himself wrote a two-volume autobiography in collaboration with his second wife, Florence, which was published after his death. Tomalin brings to the task the skills of an experienced and accomplished biographer -- among her previous subjects are Mary Wollstonecraft, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys -- and the confidence of a deeply informed literary critic. Her prose is fluid, and she can see her subject's strengths and weaknesses clearly but sympathetically.

Whenever a biographer decides to take on a person whose life has been written many times, invariably and perhaps inevitably an attempt is made to separate oneself from the crowd. Tomalin's attempt to do this -- so at least I interpret it -- is to emphasize Hardy's poetry. She begins with the death of his first wife, Emma, in 1912. She had been ill for some time, and the life had gone out of their marriage years before, but Tomalin argues that her death was "the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet." He was "filled with sorrow and remorse for their estrangement" and "began at once to revisit their early love in his mind with an intensity that expressed itself in a series of poems." Tomalin writes:

"In these poems about Emma he is rediscovering repressed sorrow and forgotten love. He is like an archaeologist uncovering objects that have not been seen for many decades, bringing them out into the light, examining them, some small pieces, some curious bones and broken bits, and some shining treasures. There is a rising excitement in the writing as of someone making discoveries. He has found the most perfect subject he has ever had, and he has the skills to work on it."

This is a biographical judgment that rings true but a literary judgment with which I must respectfully take issue. To me, Hardy's "most perfect subject" was Wessex, the fictionalized Dorset that is the setting for virtually all of his fiction, most notably his five greatest novels, Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. Hardy's poetry, though full of lovely moments, has never resonated with me the way these novels do, so the weight Tomalin accords it strikes me as excessive.

But this is a literary judgment. 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.

Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840 to a husband and wife of modest means. His father was a builder, kind and patient with a frail boy; his mother was "strong-minded and intelligent" and encouraged him to rise above his class at a time when class lines in England were rigidly drawn and almost impossible to cross. As a youth, he was deeply stung in church (a place he disliked) when the minister denounced people who were ambitious to rise in station, and this resentment stayed with him long after he had done precisely that. It is a persistent theme in his writing, the novels especially; other important themes include the ways of life of ordinary people, the injustices to which they regularly are subjected, the natural beauty with which they are surrounded, the country roads along which they walk: "The road became a theatre for action in his imagination and walking a central activity in his writing, used dramatically and to establish or underline character." By the 1870s, with the!

publication of The Return of the Native, he brought all this together. Henry James called the novel "second rate," but he was wrong:

"He was wrong because Hardy had found a true voice, sometimes awkward but tuned into experiences and feelings outside the range of Henry James. It is a voice that speaks to readers in many countries and to which successive generations have responded. With this voice Hardy established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist's eye and country people are shown playing out their lives 'between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change'. From now on all his best novels . . . were built on this foundation."

Those novels made him rich beyond anything he could have imagined and famous around the world. Though he never entered the aristocracy, he was on close terms with many members of it, who scurried to be in his company as the aura of his éclat grew ever brighter and wider. He was well aware, though, of how quickly and cruelly the upper classes could strike against their ostensible inferiors. In 1870, when he began courting Emma Gifford, her parents rejected him out of hand and refused to be present when they finally married four years later. In its early years, the marriage was reasonably happy, but husband and wife gradually drew apart; she enjoyed the fruits of his wealth and fame but thought she should get greater credit for her contributions to his work than she was given (or deserved), and he was so preoccupied with his work that he was frequently inattentive and distant. By the time of her death, he was in love with the much younger Florence Dugdale, though, as Toma!

lin says, he felt the loss of Emma deeply, which Florence (understandably) came to resent.

What Hardy lived for was his work. "From very early he began to make life into art, by seeing the special quality of natural occurrences and by dramatizing and embellishing them," but though he clearly had a calling to write he also went about it with supreme professionalism. He usually published serially and "suffered from bowdlerizing editors throughout his writing career," but he "understood the business side of writing, the importance of serialization, and how to deal with the American market, and the Australian, as well as British publishers and magazine editors."

He was not too proud to write for the market and accede to its demands, though when he prepared serials for book publication he put back material editors had removed and edited to suit his own standards rather than theirs. Among the many useful things his life and work tell us is that professionalism is not the enemy of art, but its agent and handmaiden.

Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine
Besides viewing Hardy's life from a 21st-century perspective, Claire Tomalin emphasizes his poetry as much as his novels. Her decision to do so may have stemmed from a newly found fondness for his poetry, or it may have been her rationale for writing a new Hardy biography among so many already available. Tomalin is a biographer so confident in her own voice that she can make any subject seem fresh and memorable. As in her biographies of Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Katherine Mansfield, among others, Tomalin demonstrates empathy for her subject, the ability to analyze her subject without falling into reductionism, first-rate research, logical thinking, psychological insights, and a compelling writing style.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Customer Reviews

Poetry and prose: An excellent biography
The facts of Thomas Hardy's life are well-known and reprinted in the front of most of his novels. But what we've lacked is a good, modern biography that is readable by non-academics. Ms. Tomalin, one of Britain's most experienced contemporary biographers, supplies an excellent portrait of Hardy to meet that need.

This book integrates the novels with Hardy's life story and shows that many of the strange twists of fate for which Hardy is well-known were in fact culled from careful newspaper research. While Tomalin is respectful of her subject (she indulges on very little speculation as to why two marriages produced no offspring) she's not afraid to offer a candid appraisal of some of the weaker novels as in "After the arresting start . . . the heavy paraphernalia of the Victorian novel is wheeled out creaking: coincidences pile up one after another, letters appear at the wrong moment . . ." [Two on a Tower]. And Tomalin integrates the poetry into the narrative as well.

The best contribution of Tomalin's scholarship is to divide the novels into the great (truly great) works, such as Mayor of Casterbridge, from the interesting by less worthy work churned out to meet the needs of monthly magazines. This is a more compelling distinction than Hardy's own classification: Novels of character and environment; romances and fantasies; and novels of ingenuity.

Claire Tomalin's book will richly reward those who have had the opportunity to read all of Hardy's novels, but is a most entertaining life for those who have less familiarity with the great author's work.

A Half-Hearted Hardy
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 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.

Hardy: the novelist and the poet
This new biography of Thomas Hardy by author Claire Tomalin is a deep and sensitive work about a man whose own works were hotly debated and whose personal life was often so coolly lived. Rich in detail with a wonderful narrative, Tomalin deftly remains at a distance from her subject letting the words of Hardy's books, and especially his poems, tell the story. At the end this reader wants to revisit many of Hardy's works but also to get to know his poems. After all, as Tomalin points out, Hardy considered himself more of a poet than a novelist.

A rustic man with a complex nature, Thomas Hardy seemed to live sometimes at polar opposites. Hailing from Dorset, he nonetheless made London his second home and was comfortable in each. His collective output, often expressing much joy, was hardly a mirror of his own, sad life. The interest in Tomalin's book could not have been kept had she not included his peculiar first wife, Emma and his jealous second wife, Florence. Women ruled the roost in Hardy's life and the influence these two women had on Hardy was great. Tomalin captures all of the relationships firmly.

It is a tribute to the author to get so close to Hardy without letting it becoming a hagiography (in the modern sense of the word). Added to that is the subtle humor displayed throughout. Two of the best comical observations were penned by persons who either knew or witnessed Hardy...the first being poet Arthur Benson's writing about a visit to Max Gate (the Hardy home in Dorchester) shortly before Emma's death in 1912. It's the best description of the Hardys in the book. The second account, just as humorous as the first, was written by George Bernard Shaw's wife Charlotte, who attended Hardy's second funeral at Westminster Abbey along with her husband, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and many others. The farcical nature of the day is a savored ending to the book.

Claire Tomalin is part historian, part author and part professor. In this Thomas Hardy biography she has done a great service in relating his life, writing with flair and detail. I highly recommend it.