pick★★★★★
A wonderfully informative and readable biography of one of my favourite writers. It was so well-done that I didn't want the book to end and I am today in mourning for Hardy, though he died nearly a century ago. This American edition was beautifully designed by The Penguin Press, including a reference map of the area around Dorchester by Andrew Farmer.
'If he went to church, he explained that it was not "because he believed in it, which he did not, but because it was good for the people to get clean and come together once a week - like discipline in the army."' p. 345, taken from the diary of Elliott Felkin.
'The problem of who was to live at Max Gate apart from ghosts remained.'
A wonderful sentence conveying the truth of the complicated situation at Hardy's house after the death of his first wife and displaying Tomalin's great skill as a popular biographer.
pp.170-71: '[Hardy] was always exceptionally anxious and sensitive about reviews.... He might have spared himself the trouble: the divide between those who disliked his language, his lower-class characters, his troubling women and his gloom, and those who appreciated the beauty and imaginative power of his work, was already there and remained firmly fixed throughout his career as a novelist.'
Random book from our home library:
📖 Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy
p. 147: '[Hardy's] is a voice that speaks to readers in many countries and to which successive generations have responded. With this voice Hardy established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist's eye and country people are shown playing out their lives "between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change."' (Raymond Williams)
Found for cheap at a Library store, one even has an old Borders sticker on the back,sigh.
On Oct 30, 2024, I accidentally left this book in Los Angeles. It was easily replaceable but the Stonehenge bookmark from our first trip to England was not. Thanks to my cousin Summer, both book and bookmark arrived back at my house in Utah on Apr 26, 2025!
Recent birthday acquisitions:
📖 Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life by Ralph Pite
📖 The Poetical Works of John Keats
#UniteAgainstBookBans and #LetUtahRead
