Thomas Hardy
The Time-torn Man
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4.6 • 5 Ratings
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- £0.99
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Publisher Description
The seminal biography of a great poet, novelist and sacred figure in English writing, Thomas Hardy, from bestselling author Clare Tomalin.
'An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday
Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats.
In the hands of Whitbread Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin, author of the bestselling Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, Thomas Hardy comes vividly alive.
'Another triumph for a biographer who goes from strength to strength' Melvyn Bragg, Guardian, Books of the Year
'Tomalin provides an object lesson in how to write a life' Economist
'A moving story, and Tomalin tells it vividly, with as great a fund of sympathy and sense, as can be imagined' Daily Telegraph
'Skilful and absorbing, admirable. The most compelling of life stories' Daily Telegraph
'Hardy emerges as a man full of spirit and gaiety' Sunday Times
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
