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    Thomas Hardy
    Thomas Hardy
    Thomas Hardy
    Audiobook14 hours

    Thomas Hardy

    Written by Claire Tomalin

    Narrated by Josephine Bailey

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJan 11, 2007
    ISBN9781400173983
    Thomas Hardy

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    Reviews for Thomas Hardy

    4/5

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    • 3/5
      A well written biography but I despite loving Hardy’s novels I did not enjoy reading about his life and found that although Claire Tomalin tried to get as much excitement out of his life as possible it was as much as I could do to keep my eyes open at times, although that is really not Claire Tomalin’s fault or Thomas Hardys either! On the plus side, it did inspire me to check out his poetry.
    • 5/5
      I read this now because at the end of Streets of Laredo<, one of the characters picks up a copy of Tess of the D'Urbervilles at a railway station bookstore because of her adopted daughter Tess. I've read a lot of Hardy, though not recently, and like him a lot - his descriptions of rural life are so striking and his characters so compelling. This book is quite interesting, with a lot about his first marriage, which started out happily. Emma Hardy was an aspiring writer and helped him with copying and so forth, but as the years went by he turned to her less, which she deeply resented. They became estranged to the point where she had moved to an attic bedroom at the time she died. He had flirtations during this period, and married again, but that marriage doesn't seem to have been satisfying either. There’s a lot of good stuff about his rise in class and how that affected his writing and relationships, with his family and with other writers.As other reviewers have noted, the copy editing in the edition I was reading was terrible.
    • 3/5
      Thomas Hardy was an early obsession of mine and I'm not ashamed to admit that it all began with the 1967 John Schlesinger film of Far From the Madding Crowd with Julie Christie, Alan Bates, Terence Stamp and Peter Finch. Much as I loved the movie, I found I loved the book even more and I went on to read all the major novels and a fair amount of the poetry as well. I think Hardy was the first writer who made me want to read absolutely everything he wrote, though I still haven't met that goal. The project was abandoned shortly after finishing Jude the Obscure for reasons which will probably be obvious to anyone who has read this masterpiece of gloom and doom. I can't say I've followed Claire Tomalin's writing with the same sort of devotion but I have really enjoyed almost everything I've read by her, beginning with the wonderful Mrs. Jordan's Profession and, most especially The Invisible Woman: The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens, which is as much literary detective story as biography. Her Samuel Pepys: The Unequaled Self is also terrific. So, as you can imagine, my expectations were rather high when I began Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy. For that reason I feel I need to be somewhat forgiving in my assessment of the biography for, as I've often said, the secret to happiness in life is to keep one's expectations in check. Be that as it may, I was disappointed and I'm hard pressed to say exactly why. It's a good biography. It's thorough, well-researched, economical and covers just about everything that needs to be covered. But it just sort of plods along and rarely leaps to the level of insight and empathy I've come to expect from this author. Had I no prior interest in either the subject or the writer I'm not sure I would have continued with this. However, she does manage to bring it all home in fine style with this wonderful summation: "He knew the past like a man who has lived more than one span of life, and he understood how difficult it is to cast aside the beliefs of your forebears. At the same time he faced his own extinction with no wish to be comforted and no hope of immortality. He wrote honest poems, almost every one shaped and structured with its own thoughts and its own music. They remind us that he was a fiddler's son, with music in his blood and bone, who danced to his father's playing before he learnt to write. This is how I like to think of him, a boy dancing on the stone cottage floor, outside time, oblivious, ecstatic, with his future greatness as unimaginable as the sorrows that came with it."Reading that made me glad I had persevered. I'm glad to see, from LyzzyBee's review, that, apparently, the UK edition is well edited. Sadly, this is not the case with the American edition. But, happily, that means this volume, for whatever else one may think of it, contains one of the best typos I've ever run across. On page 177, we read about Hardy and Tennyson spending a jolly afternoon together wherein the latter "told him stories about misprints in his own work, 'airy' changed to 'hairy' pleasing him particularly." I wonder what the great men would have thought of the misprint that appears two pages later, on 179. In the midst of a paragraph about problems in the Hardy marriage, the word "entertain" is split due to a line break and the last syllable, clearly intended to be included, is not, so that we get a rather different reading of the situation, best appreciated by including the sentence that precedes the sentence with the omission. I'll attempt to preserve the layout on the page (pun only slightly intended.)"Emma still had nothing to do except embroidery, keeping a cat, orderingabout a servant or two and shopping. Hardy did his best to enter-her, escorting her to the Lord Mayor's show …"
    • 4/5
      A well-done, competent biography, well-researched and obviously with the connection with her subject that good biography demands. Tomalin admits that Hardy quite obviously wanted to keep his life private, but she does fall prey a little bit to reading maybe too much about his personal thoughts and life into his poetry, and there are some moments of what appear to be pure conjecture, if you follow the footnotes through. Still, a good read (and well copy-edited!) on perhaps a particularly difficult subject, and it certainly made me a) want to go back to the novels and b) realised how many more of his poems I know than I thought I knew.
    • 5/5
      As is usual with Claire Tomalin biographies this is a wonderful evocation of a life. She deals with Hardy's complexity both as a man and a writer without ever being judgemental. It is hard to reconcile the man who wrote to Rider Haggard, 'sympathy with you both in your bereavement. Though, to be candid, I think the death of a child is never to be regretted, when one reflects on what he has escaped.' with the man who wrote such wonderful poetry in mourning of his first wife. Emma Hardy is a fascinating character in her own right and one who it seems has been unfairly demonised throughout the years, Tomalin writes that 'she had many faults, but her courage was unflinching and she remained stoic.' I love how Tomalin has used his great poetry throughout her text and I shall be searching out my collection of Hardy's poetry for a reread.I