THOMAS HARDY: A BIOG - Hardcover

Millgate, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0394488024 ISBN 13: 9780394488028

Publisher: Random House, 1982

Synopsis

Based on newly discovered material, diaries, notebooks, letters, local records, and newspaper articles, this comprehensive biography presents a balanced view of Hardy as an artist and as a man

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Millgate was born in England and educated at Cambridge University, before doing a PhD in American literature at Leeds. He moved to the University of Toronto in 1967, where he devoted his time to studying the life and works of Thomas Hardy. 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

"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

"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

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: Random House
• Publication date: 1982
• ISBN 10: 0394488024
• ISBN 13: 9780394488028
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 637