Thomas Hardy [Audiobook, CD, Unabridged] [Audio CD]

Claire Tomalin (Author), Josephine Bailey (Narrator)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 11, 2007

Whitbread Award winner Claire Tomalin's seminal biography of the enigmatic novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. Today Thomas Hardy is best known for creating the great Wessex landscape as the backdrop to his rural stories, starting with Far from the Madding Crowd, and making them classics. But his true legacy is that of a progressive thinker. When he published Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure late in his career, Hardy explored a very different world than that of his rural tales, one in which the plight of lower classes and women take center stage while the higher classes are damned. Ironically, though, Hardy remained cloaked in the arms of this very upper class during the publication of these books, acting at all times in complete convention with the rules of society. Was he using his books to express himself in a way he felt unable to do in the company he kept, or did he know sensationalism would sell? Award-winning author Claire Tomalin expertly reconstructs the life that led Hardy to maintain conventionality and write revolution. Born in Dorset in 1840, Hardy came of age in rather meager circumstances. At sixteen, he left home for London and slowly worked his way through many rejections to become a published writer. Despite his mother's admonitions to never marry, he wed Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874 and, even though he fell easily in love, stayed true to her till her death in 1912. He frequently toured London society, but few felt they knew the true Hardy, and it is this very core of self that Tomalin elegantly brings us to know so completely. Hardy's work consistently challenged sexual and religious conventions in a way that few other books of his time did. Though his personal modesty and kindness allowed some to underestimate him or even to pity him, they did not prevent him from taking on the central themes of human experience-time, memory, loss, love, fear, grief, anger, uncertainty, death. And it was exactly his quiet life, full of the small, personal dramas of family quarrels, rivalries, and at times, despair, that infuses his works with the rich detail that sets them apart as masterpieces. In this engrossing biography, Tomalin skillfully identifies the inner demons and the outer mores that drove Hardy and presents a rich and complex portrait of one of the greatest figures in English literature.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. 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. (Jan. 15)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Besides viewing Hardy's life from a 21st-century perspective, Claire Tomalin emphasizes his poetry as much as his novels. Her decision to do so may have stemmed from a newly found fondness for his poetry, or it may have been her rationale for writing a new Hardy biography among so many already available. Tomalin is a biographer so confident in her own voice that she can make any subject seem fresh and memorable. As in her biographies of Jane Austen, Samuel Pepys, Mary Wollstonecraft, and Katherine Mansfield, among others, Tomalin demonstrates empathy for her subject, the ability to analyze her subject without falling into reductionism, first-rate research, logical thinking, psychological insights, and a compelling writing style.
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Audio CD
• Publisher: Tantor Media; Unabridged edition (January 11, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400103983
• ISBN-13: 978-1400103980
• Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 5.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #4,016,501 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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32 of 35 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Poetry and prose: An excellent biography, January 19, 2007

By 

David Robinson (Oakland, CA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thomas Hardy (Hardcover)

The facts of Thomas Hardy's life are well-known and reprinted in the front of most of his novels. But what we've lacked is a good, modern biography that is readable by non-academics. Ms. Tomalin, one of Britain's most experienced contemporary biographers, supplies an excellent portrait of Hardy to meet that need.

This book integrates the novels with Hardy's life story and shows that many of the strange twists of fate for which Hardy is well-known were in fact culled from careful newspaper research. While Tomalin is respectful of her subject (she indulges on very little speculation as to why two marriages produced no offspring) she's not afraid to offer a candid appraisal of some of the weaker novels as in "After the arresting start . . . the heavy paraphernalia of the Victorian novel is wheeled out creaking: coincidences pile up one after another, letters appear at the wrong moment . . ." [Two on a Tower]. And Tomalin integrates the poetry into the narrative as well.

The best contribution of Tomalin's scholarship is to divide the novels into the great (truly great) works, such as Mayor of Casterbridge, from the interesting by less worthy work churned out to meet the needs of monthly magazines. This is a more compelling distinction than Hardy's own classification: Novels of character and environment; romances and fantasies; and novels of ingenuity.

Claire Tomalin's book will richly reward those who have had the opportunity to read all of Hardy's novels, but is a most entertaining life for those who have less familiarity with the great author's work.

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Half-Hearted Hardy, April 17, 2007

By 

Jay Dickson (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

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This review is from: Thomas Hardy (Hardcover)

No biography by Claire Tomalin can be anything less than interesting and readable, but unfortunately after her superior efforts on the lives of Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys in recent years Tomalin has produced a biography that is neither very needed nor one of her better efforts. Few of the great English writers have a life already better chronicled than Hardy, given the recent excellent biographical study by Millgate (not to mention the two-volume autobiography Hardy himself produced late in life and had published posthumously as a "biography" under the name of his second wife Florence). Tomalin's room to make a new mark here is thus very limited, and she does so by emphasizing his poetry, his relations with his first wife Emma, and by engaging in some very bizarre speculation based on the few areas in Hardy's life where we have very little evidence. Where such speculation was necessary for her lives of Austen and Pepys (given the comparative paucity of supporting materials about their lives, and, in Austen's case, of first-hand documentation of her subject's life), it seems perverse when dealing with a life so thoroughly documented both by Hardy himself and by those who knew them. In one instance, she proposes that because the name of Abel Whittle is THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE is also the name of a Dorset man who was a contemporary of Hardy's mother Jemima, that this might mean that Hardy collaborated with the plot of that novel with his mother--a highly dubious speculation.

Tomalin is on much more solid ground when she talks about Hardy's famous deteriorating relationship with his odd lonely wife Emma, who grew to loathe her husband in her later years and to document that hatred in great detail in her journals. Emma Hardy emerges as a much more distinct character in this work than does the droll, controlling Hardy or his frustrated second wife Florence, and again it might have been better had Tomalin stuck more to the facts to give a fuller portrait of her three main figures. The biography is also oddly too short, given the length of Hardy's life: odd details, like his brief meeting with the Prince of Wales in the twenties, whereas his relations with other writers (such as E. M. Forster) are given in barely any of the space they deserve. And at times Tomalin does not seem to have taken her narrative through the requisite drafts she might have: for example, midway through one paragraph she suddenly begins to describe in great detail a vitriolic attack Emma Hardy directed against Hardy's sister Mary without any explanation whatsoever of what prompted the tirade. Hardy's life was too rich, and Tomalin too good of a writer, for this book to be unreadable or uninteresting, but given her achievements with her biographies of Austen, Pepys, Katherine Mansfield, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others this book comes as a big let-down.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Hardy: the novelist and the poet, February 17, 2007

By 

Jon Hunt "musician, teacher" (Old Greenwich, Ct. USA) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Thomas Hardy (Hardcover)

This new biography of Thomas Hardy by author Claire Tomalin is a deep and sensitive work about a man whose own works were hotly debated and whose personal life was often so coolly lived. Rich in detail with a wonderful narrative, Tomalin deftly remains at a distance from her subject letting the words of Hardy's books, and especially his poems, tell the story. At the end this reader wants to revisit many of Hardy's works but also to get to know his poems. After all, as Tomalin points out, Hardy considered himself more of a poet than a novelist.

A rustic man with a complex nature, Thomas Hardy seemed to live sometimes at polar opposites. Hailing from Dorset, he nonetheless made London his second home and was comfortable in each. His collective output, often expressing much joy, was hardly a mirror of his own, sad life. The interest in Tomalin's book could not have been kept had she not included his peculiar first wife, Emma and his jealous second wife, Florence. Women ruled the roost in Hardy's life and the influence these two women had on Hardy was great. Tomalin captures all of the relationships firmly.

It is a tribute to the author to get so close to Hardy without letting it becoming a hagiography (in the modern sense of the word). Added to that is the subtle humor displayed throughout. Two of the best comical observations were penned by persons who either knew or witnessed Hardy...the first being poet Arthur Benson's writing about a visit to Max Gate (the Hardy home in Dorchester) shortly before Emma's death in 1912. It's the best description of the Hardys in the book. The second account, just as humorous as the first, was written by George Bernard Shaw's wife Charlotte, who attended Hardy's second funeral at Westminster Abbey along with her husband, Rudyard Kipling, J.M. Barrie, Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and many others. The farcical nature of the day is a savored ending to the book.

Claire Tomalin is part historian, part author and part professor. In this Thomas Hardy biography she has done a great service in relating his life, writing with flair and detail. I highly recommend it.