Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited [Hardcover]

Michael Millgate (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 4, 2004

Michael Millgate's classic biography of Thomas Hardy, was first published in 1982. Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably-expanded new edition Millgate, the world's leading Hardy scholar, draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited will become the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"Millgate amplifies his much-admired 1982 life of the novelist, drawing on new archival material. This is one of those thick, well-written biographies one can happily lose oneself in."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"One of the many achievements of Michael Millgate's seminal biography of Hardy, appearing now in a revised and expanded edition two decades after its original publication, is its careful depiction of just how the author was able to take the raw material of his rural youth and turn it into what Millgate called 'a total imaginative world with a solid, complex, and comprehensively realized existence in space and time.'"--The Globe and Mail [Toronto]

"Since [the] first edition, Millgate has edited an impressive array of materials on Hardy.... Millgate's immersion in these materials caused him to reconsider several facets of Hardy's life and career. For example, Millgate provides here a fresh treatment of Hardy's upbringing in rural Dorchester and offers an insightful analysis of Hardy's complicated attitudes about class. Millgate also creates a sophisticated, balanced view of Hardy's two wives.... Beautifully written and meticulously researched by the world's leading Hardy scholar, this book replaces the earlier edition. Essential."--Choice

"Few biographers have the good fortune to be able to rewrite so fully a major study twenty years later, and Millgate has made the most of it."--English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

"Milllgate's Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited has been so thoroughly revised and updated that it fully merits the new title. Millgate has ample new findings to draw on (other scholars' and his own), and the updated work is likely to be the standard biography for at least another twenty years."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900

Praise for the previous edition: "The standard biography, indispensable to all who covet the particulars of Hardy's life."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"By far the most detailed and comprehensive account of Hardy's personal and literary life now available."--Times Literary Supplement

"A splendid biography.... Millgate is the kind of biographer who writers dream of. He gives us all the necessary details, but none of the gratuitous ones."--The New York Times

"There has been no better account of the genesis and production of the novels, and of the magnitude of both the achievement and the cost."--New Statesman

About the Author

Michael Millgate was born in England and educated at Cambridge University, before doing a PhD in American literature at Leeds. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1967, where he devoted his time to studying the life and works of Thomas Hardy. He has edited seven volumes of Hardy's letters, and the selected letters of his wives.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 638 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (November 4, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0199275653
• ISBN-13: 978-0199275656
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,605,529 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Definitive Thomas Hardy., January 30, 2005

By 

G. Merritt (Boulder, CO) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Hardcover)

Michael Millgate knows his Hardy. After all, he is perhaps the world's leading Thomas Hardy scholar. After publishing his Hardy biography in 1982, Professor Millgate went on to edit the COLLECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS HARDY 1926-27 (1988) and THOMAS HARDY: SELECTED LETTERS (1990). Those letters contained new information about Hardy, which Millgate incorporates into this fully revised, definitive new study of Hardy's life and work.

Because Hardy was such an intensely private person who carefully guarded the pariculars of his life, examining his life in detail was clearly no easy task. However, Millgate not only triumphs in bringing his subject to life in this 625-page biography, but also succeeds in demonstrating that "numerous aspects of A PAIR OF BLUE EYES, UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE, and even FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD are clearly autobiographical, and the later evidence of THE WOODLANDERS, TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES, and JUDE urges the conclusion that Hardy's best work tended to have strong and specific roots in his own background and experience" (pp. 186-7). Millgate follows the life of Thomas Hardy from his "solitary" and "remarkably uneventful" childhood (p. 39) in Bockhampton, to his architectural studies (p. 55), through his his difficult marriage to his first wife, Emma (an agnostic woman who became bleakly evangelical--much like Sue Brideshead in JUDE), to his transition from "pessimistic" novelist to an esteemed poet in his later years. Along the way, in his careful analysis of Hardy's writing, Millgate shows that Hardy was a "Pessimistic Meliorist" (p. 378), who "could see only an incomprehensible and probably meaningless universe," but who also "cared deeply about the human condition, perceived value in individual lives, asserted such traditional and Christian values as charity and what he liked to call 'loving kindness,' and thought that things could and indeed get better" (p. 379).

For those, like me, who are fascinated with Thomas Hardy and his novels, this equally fascinating biography should be considered required reading.

G. Merritt

1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Volume Not To Be Missed, November 30, 2007

By 

Karen Lennon (Chicago, Illinois USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (Paperback)

This is not a volume to be passed over. Although Millgate doesn't detail the expansions and revisions to his acclaimed biography of 1982, his learning, refinements, and discriminations make this a new work. Its like will not be found over any horizon you may be looking for--anytime soon.