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Penguin
January 2007
On Sale: January 18, 2007
512 pages
ISBN: 1594201188
EAN: 9781594201189
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Biography
Whitbread Award winner Claire Tomalin's seminal biography of
the enigmatic novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. Today Thomas Hardy is best known for creating the great
Wessex landscape as the backdrop to his rural stories,
starting with Far from the Madding Crowd, and making them
classics. But his true legacy is that of a progressive
thinker. When he published Tess of the d'Urbervilles and
Jude the Obscure late in his career, Hardy explored a very
different world than that of his rural tales, one in which
the plight of lower classes and women take center stage
while the higher classes are damned. Ironically, though,
Hardy remained cloaked in the arms of this very upper class
during the publication of these books, acting at all times
in complete convention with the rules of society. Was he
using his books to express himself in a way he felt unable
to do in the company he kept, or did he know sensationalism
would sell? Award-winning author Claire Tomalin expertly
reconstructs the life that led Hardy to maintain
conventionality and write revolution. Born in Dorset in 1840, Hardy came of age in rather meager
circumstances. At sixteen, he left home for London and
slowly worked his way through many rejections to become a
published writer. Despite his mother's admonitions to never
marry, he wed Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 and, even though
he fell easily in love, stayed true to her till her death in
1912. He frequently toured London society, but few felt they
knew the true Hardy, and it is this very core of self that
Tomalin elegantly brings us to know so completely. Hardy's work consistently challenged sexual and religious
conventions in a way that few other books of his time did.
Though his personal modesty and kindness allowed some to
underestimate him or even to pity him, they did not prevent
him from taking on the central themes of human
experience-time, memory, loss, love, fear, grief, anger,
uncertainty, death. And it was exactly his quiet life, full
of the small, personal dramas of family quarrels, rivalries,
and at times, despair, that infuses his works with the rich
detail that sets them apart as masterpieces. In this
engrossing biography, Tomalin skillfully identifies the
inner demons and the outer mores that drove Hardy and
presents a rich and complex portrait of one of the greatest
figures in English literature.
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