Book description
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
'Skilful and absorbing, admirable. The most compelling of life
stories' Daily Telegraph
'Hardy emerges as a man full of spirit and gaiety' Sunday Times
Claire Tomalin is the award-winning author of eight highly acclaimed
biographies, including: The Life and Death of Mary
Wollstonecraft; Shelley and His World; Katherine
Mansfield: A Secret Life; The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly
Ternan and Charles Dickens; Mrs Jordan's Profession; Jane Austen: A
Life; Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self; Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn
Man and, most recently, Charles Dickens: A Life. A former
literary editor of the New Statesman and the Sunday
Times, she is married to the playwright and novelist Michael Frayn.
Claire Tomalin was literary editor of the
New Statesman
and
Sunday Times
. She has published a collection of journalism and is the author of
seven highly acclaimed biographies, including:
The Life and Death of
Mary Wollstonecraft (
Whitbread First Book Prize);
The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly
Ternan and Charles Dickens
(Hawthornden Prize, the NCR Book Award and James Tait Black Memorial
Prize for Biography); and
Pepys: The Unequalled Self
(Whitbread Book of the Year).
