Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited - Softcover

Millgate, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0199275661 ISBN 13: 9780199275663

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 2006

Synopsis

Michael Millgate's classic biography of Thomas Hardy, was first published in 1982. Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably-expanded new edition Millgate, the world's leading Hardy scholar, draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited will become the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Millgate is University Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He has edited seven volumes of Hardy's letters, and the selected letters of his wives.

Review:

"Millgate amplifies his much-admired 1982 life of the novelist, drawing on new archival material. This is one of those thick, well-written biographies one can happily lose oneself in."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"One of the many achievements of Michael Millgate's seminal biography of Hardy, appearing now in a revised and expanded edition two decades after its original publication, is its careful depiction of just how the author was able to take the raw material of his rural youth and turn it into what Millgate called 'a total imaginative world with a solid, complex, and comprehensively realized existence in space and time.'"--The Globe and Mail [Toronto]

"Since [the] first edition, Millgate has edited an impressive array of materials on Hardy.... Millgate's immersion in these materials caused him to reconsider several facets of Hardy's life and career. For example, Millgate provides here a fresh treatment of Hardy's upbringing in rural Dorchester and offers an insightful analysis of Hardy's complicated attitudes about class. Millgate also creates a sophisticated, balanced view of Hardy's two wives.... Beautifully written and meticulously researched by the world's leading Hardy scholar, this book replaces the earlier edition. Essential."--Choice

"Milllgate's Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited has been so thoroughly revised and updated that it fully merits the new title. Millgate has ample new findings to draw on (other scholars' and his own), and the updated work is likely to be the standard biography for at least another twenty years."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "Few biographers have the good fortune to be able to rewrite so fully a major study twenty years later, and Millgate has made the most of it."--English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Praise for the previous edition: "The standard biography, indispensable to all who covet the particulars of Hardy's life."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"By far the most detailed and comprehensive account of Hardy's personal and literary life now available."--Times Literary Supplement

"A splendid biography.... Millgate is the kind of biographer who writers dream of. He gives us all the necessary details, but none of the gratuitous ones."--The New York Times

"There has been no better account of the genesis and production of the novels, and of the magnitude of both the achievement and the cost."--New Statesman

About this edition

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 0199275661
• ISBN 13: 9780199275663
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 625