Claire tomalin hardy biography

The seminal biography of a great poet, novelist and sacred figure in English writing, Thomas Hardy, from bestselling author Clare Tomalin.
This seminal biography covers Hardy's illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling.
Claire Tomalin reviewed Robert Gittings's landmark biography of Thomas Hardy.

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Thomas Hardy is the acclaimed biography by bestselling author Claire 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 books Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come 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

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Thomas Hardy

December 27, 2012
You love not me,
And love alone can lend you loyalty;
-I know and knew it. But, unto the store
Of human deeds divine in all but name,
Was it not worth a little hour or more
To add yet this: Once you, a woman, came
To soothe a time-torn man; even though it be
You love not me.

In one of the BBC's Book Club programmes Claire Tomalin disarmingly tells how she was more or less forced by her publisher to come up with a decent by-line to her biography of Thomas Hardy, which she had hoped to call, in all simplicity, Thomas Hardy. And how she scoured, once more, the poems, desperately hoping for an idea, any idea. 'Time-torn', taken from his poem A Broken Appointment, how about that? Float that with the editor, does he like it? He did indeed, and by one of those felicitous fancies of fate, it resonates beautifully with her wonderfully nuanced portrayal of this figure.

Time torn: a man who was born at the beginning of the Victorian age, in 1840, just three years after Victoria became queen, and who lived on until the roaring twenties, friend of Vir
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1st Edition. Near fine cloth copy in a near-fine, very slightly edge-nicked and dust-dulled dust wrapper, now mylar-sleeved. Remains particularly well-preserved overall; tight, bright, clean and strong. Physical description: xxv, 486 pages: illustrations; 24 cm. Contents: pt. 1. 1840-1867. Mother; Child; The bookish boy; Friends and brothers; The Londoner. -- pt. 2. 1867-1874. The clever lad's dream; Lyonnesse; The true vocation; Easy to die; A short visit to the continent. -- pt. 3. 1875-1905. Dreaming the heath; Hardy joins a club; The tower; The conformers; The blighted star; Tom and Em; The terra-cotta dress; A witch and a wife; Cat, bird, eagle, sphinx. -- pt. 4. 1905-1928. Convergence; Satires of circumstance; A friend from Cambridge; The wizard; Winter words. Subjects: Hardy, Thomas 1840-1928. Hardy, Thomas 1840-1928; Biography. Authors, English 19th century; Biography. Authors, English 20th century; Biography. Poets, English 20th century; Biography. Poets, English 19th century; Biography. Hardy, Thomas, 1840-1928; Late 19th century English literature; Biography. Genre