Thomas Hardy

by Tim Dolin

Date: 2008-03-15

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Thomas Hardy is best known for his 'Wessex Novels', and his home country of Dorstet is known to literary tourists as 'Hardy Country'. Yet Hardy's own relationship with his background was a complex one. Education seperated him from his forebears, and his chronicler of disappearing rural life in fact spent half his time in London, mixing the literary world and high society. He was a highly 'modern' writer, his bestselling novels dealing with issues arisisng out of the changes in society wrought by 19th century industrialization, and his frank discription of sexual matters caused endless wranglingwith bowdlerizing editors and publishers.             

This new biography reveals the conflicts in both Hardy's professional and personal life and describes a man intimately and and dynamically engaged with the world of politics, ideas and culture as well as the world of rural 'Wessex'; a novelist and poetwho fused powerfully localized imagination with a cosmopolitan effect.

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