Thomas Hardy

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.

"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." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"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,... Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review) 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 eclat 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 Tomalin 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.

Jonathan Yardley's e-mail address is yardleyj(at)washpost.com.

" Reviewed by Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World (Copyright 2006 Washington Post Book World Service/Washington Post Writers Group)
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"Full of empathy and clear thought, Tomalin has written a compelling, riveting story as well as a thoroughly researched biography." Boston Globe

"Tomalin's discussion of his poetry provides the book's true through-line, and it's first-rate." Los Angeles Times

"A sensitive and nuanced portrait of one of the greatest 19th century writers." Newsday

"Tomalin gives us Hardy, the man and the artist, and the two halves are gently reconciled by virtue of this scrupulous and luminous biography." Chicago Tribune

"Tomalin's treatment throughout is well informed but popular in focus; she has no political or theoretical ax to grind." Library Journal

"A priceless resource for the general reader and the Victorian scholar." Booklist

In this seminal biography of the enigmatic novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d'Urbervilles), Whitbread Award winner 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.

Claire Tomalin is the author of Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self, winner of the Whitbread Book of the Year, the Whitbread Biography Award, the Samuel Pepys Award, and dubbed "invaluable" by The New York Review of Books. She is a trustee of the National Portrait Gallery, London, and the Wordsworth Trust, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Vice President of English PEN. She lives her husband, the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn