Synopses & Reviews
"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.
Review
"A fascinating case study in mid-Victorian literary sociology."
-The New York Times
"Admirable . . . One returns to Thomas Hardy with renewed pleasure and surprise."
-The New York Review of Books
"Tomalin brings . . . the skills of an experienced and accomplished biographer . . . and the confidence of a deeply informed literary critic."
-Jonathan Yardley, The Washington Post
Synopsis
A seminal portrait of the enigmatic nineteenth-century novelist and poet, written by the Whitbread Book of the Year-winning author of Samuel Pepys, discusses his humble origins, rise through the London literary scene, and efforts to challenge the sexual and religious conventions of his time. 50,000 first printing.
About the Author
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