Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man

Description

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, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come vividly alive. 'An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers.' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday '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 'Painfully gripping . . . acute and original. A great biographer.' Carole Angier, Literary Review 'Hardy emerges as a man full of spirit and gaiety.' Sunday Times

Claire Tomalin was born in London in 1933 of a French father and an English mother, and was educated at Newnham College, Cambridge. She has worked in publishing and journalism all her life, becoming literary editor first of the New Statesman and then of the Sunday Times, which she left in 1986. She is also the author of The Life and Death of Mary Wollstonecraft, which won the Whitbread First Book Prize for 1974; Shelley and His World (reissued by Penguin in 1992); Katherine Mansfield- A Secret Life (Penguin 1988), a biography of the modernist writer on whom she also based her 1991 play The Winter Wife; the highly-acclaimed The Invisible Woman- The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens (Penguin 1991), which won the NCR Book Award for 1991, as well as the Hawthornden Prize and the 1990 James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Biography; and Mrs Jordan's Profession (Penguin 1995), a study of the Regency actress. Other books written for Penguin are- Jane Austen- A Life and a collection of memoirs entitled Several Strangers.