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 Warmly written, warmly recommended December 20, 2007
jfp2006 (PARIS/France)
3 out of 3 found this review helpful
As a teenager I found Thomas Hardy's major novels totally absorbing, his rural world totally different from the one I was growing up in, his characters totally engaging in their humility and their simplicity. Where Dickens seemed hard going (particularly "Hard Times", the first one we had foisted on us at school) and sometimes recklessly over the top, Hardy's gentle rustic realism always seemed that much more believable.
This flawlessly researched and meticulously written biography has taken me back to Hardy's world, all that stuff about the pathos underlying the grandeur and the grandeur underlying the pathos (I think that's how it was encapsulated somewhere...) The major novels will all have to be shifted on to the re-read pile now... But, as befits a biographical approach, it is Hardy the man who comes astonisinghly to life in these pages, and he comes over as a man racked with contradictions, a man who rose up above, even rebelled against, his humble background, and yet never quite forgave himself for doing so. A God-fearing atheist as well (in rather the same way in which Byron has been decribed as a revolutionary aristocrat). The only one of four children not to heed his mother's advice never to marry, remaining steadfastly loyal to his first wife while often cordially detesting her, and never quite coming to terms with the way he was, basically, manipulated into a second marriage by a woman nearly forty years his junior.
Claire Tomalin has already written critically acclaimed biographies of, among others, Shelley, Katherine Mansfield, Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys. Her style is smooth and polished, with just the odd surprising jagged edge sticking out, as when she gets on to "Jude The Obscure":
"Reading 'Jude' is like being hit in the face over and over again."
I well remember the unbearably depressing effect of reading "Jude", but I would never have expressed that effect with quite such a simile.
Tomalin also strikes me as rather too simplistic in her division of certain of the novels into "masterpieces" and "failures" (with "Two On A Tower", about which she seems unable to make up her mind, classed as an "interesting oddity").
After the scandalised reception of "Jude The Obscure" in 1895, Hardy turned definitively away from the novel and devoted the last thirty years of his life to poetry, new and old (some of it having been written many years prior to publication). Tomalin draws attention to the enormous variety to be found within the poetry, and singles out highly acclaimed poems such as "The Darkling Thrush" and "The Ruined Maid", a highly amusing dialogue between a naïve former acquaintance and a countrygirl-turned-harlot:
- 'Your hands were lke paws then, your face blue and bleak
But now I'm bewitched by your delicate cheek,
And your little gloves fit as on any la-dy!' -
'We never do work when we're ruined,' said she.
The epilogue to the biography concentrates, unexpectedly, on the wrangling over where Hardy should be buried: with his family, as he had stipulated, or in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, as his influential friends thought appropriate (in brazen defiance of Hardy's own will and testament). The way the dispute was resolved is the most shocking revelation in the biography (and I still can't quite believe what I read in those final pages...)
I've always had reservations about biography, thinking that the life of a human being, especially a creative one, is so complex that any attempt to present it will either just scratch the surface or else be too obviously subjective in its approach - or even both. But this one has made me start to think otherwise. Tomalin is indeed, as one reviewer puts it, "the most empathetic of biographers", and I look forward to getting to know Jane Austen, and possibly Katherine Mansfield, in her genial company.
 A good story December 6, 2007
Jeremy Walton (Oxford, UK)
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
I borrowed this from my friend earlier this year and finished it last month on a trip to Dorset. I read Robert Gittings' two-volume biography of Hardy a long time ago, so the story of his remarkable life and his two contrasting marriages was familiar to me, but it was good to hear about these things again. Claire Tomalin has an easy style which occasionally slips into the second person as she suggests to the reader what "you" might have thought had you been there, but she's also worked hard at her research and brings up some interesting snippets. For example, at one point she notes that Hardy was friends with Bertrand Russell's aunt, and wonders what each would have made of the other had they met. She also gives a memorable vignette from (one of) Hardy's funerals, which was probably the only occasion on which Kipling and Shaw met.
But - as others have pointed out - it's Tomalin's treatment of the poetry that takes up most of her attention. The tale of how his guilt and regret at his first wife's death found its expression in a large collection of extraordinary poetry (which profoundly unsettled his second wife) is a distinctive one, and is worth telling in detail, but I'd've liked more attention paid to his novels. These - I think - are the route through which most readers encounter Hardy but unfortunately, she seems to lose interest in them as she goes through his life; certainly the treatment of his later books - which are far more important - is more cursory than the account she gives of the earlier ones.
If you only read one Hardy biography, this is the one. November 12, 2007
NT Waters (Sweden)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I am probably not the right person to write a review as I only seem to be stung into action when I feel that someone else has written nonsense. In this case someone who has written a dissertation on Hardy and asks "Why write a book on someone that you clearly have no interest in?"
I want to answer that by saying that this seems to me to be an admirable starting point. I am fed up with biographies that are either character assassination or fawning worship. When I read a biography, I don't want the biographer's spin! This biography seems to have captured the essential points of Hardy's life in an objective way while still being a very good read.
I also want to say that I don't think the author is at all uninterested or disinterested in Hardy. I think that she adds information that lights up the book showing that there is an admiration for a writer who achieved so much.
It is a very good biography and, as someone who is disturbed by factual errors, I can find only small issues. I very much enjoyed the detail that some reviewers would like to have been left out. This is a worthy biography that, in paperback, is accessible in content and format to anyone with an interest in Thomas Hardy. My headline should serve as a summary.
If you can find fault with this biography or don't like it, then I challenge you to write a better one!
Hardy the Enigma July 24, 2007
Gregory S. Buzwell (London)
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
Thomas Hardy will always remain something of an enigma: a man best known for his lyrical descriptions of landscape and country life who almost without fail chose to spend the summer months in the smog and grime of London; a man who wrote some of the most moving love poems in the language in honour of his wife but only after her death and only after treating her with cold neglect during their marriage. A man obsessed with class and social status who in his novels always sided with the underdog. He is, I suspect, simultaneously a biographer's dream subject (so many contradictions, such a fascinating character) and worst nightmare (so enigmatic and so inconsistent).
I thoroughly enjoyed Claire Tomalin's book, although I do have one or two reservations. She is excellent on Hardy's attitudes towards women. Hardy clearly adored the ladies, albeit in an idealised sense. One only has to read his descriptions of Eustacia Vye in 'The Return of the Native' or of Tess in the book that bears her name to see how much beautiful women appealed to him, and indeed how well he understood them. The women in his own life however, especially his first wife Emma Gifford, failed, through no fault of their own, to live up to his ideals and he sadly became tired of them. Emma's journey as Hardy's wife, taking her from a free-spirited girl to a sad and lonely figure living almost alone in an attic, is well explained in the book. You sense Tomalin has a deep sympathy for Emma and she does much to portray her as a thinking, feeling human being. A woman who played a major role in Hardy's development both as a novelist and as a poet.
The book is also very good on Hardy's childhood and his youthful friendship with the brilliant but troubled Horace Moule. Youthful experiences are important in the development of any writer and Tomalin does Hardy full justice here. Where I think she does less well is with Hardy the elderly gentleman. He struggles for success, he writes his novels, he falls in and out of love with numerous fascinating women, his wife dies and he writes several beautiful poems in her honour .... and then it all seems to drift into nothingness. Hardy lived for sixteen more years following Emma's death, he remarried, published several excellent volumes of poetry and became a grand old man of English letters, courted by royalty and the literary establishment alike, and yet this part of his life seems very sketchily dealt with in the book, almost as if the author had rather lost interest. Also a few errors creep in. At one point Hardy is described as visiting Samuel Hoare and his wife, Lady Alda Hoare, at Stourhead. Hardy certainly visited Lady Alda at Stourhead, but she was married to Henry Hoare, not Samuel. Samuel Hoare, the politician, had nothing to do with either Lady Alda, Stourhead or indeed with Hardy.
Still these are minor quibbles with what is generally a good and informative read. Besides, the best measure of success for any literary biography is the speed with which it sends the reader back to the works of the author under discussion. As I have already started re-reading one of Hardy's novels, in this sense, Claire Tomalin has succeeded admirably.
Extraordinarily good biography of a great writer June 25, 2007
Jo Manning (Miami Beach, FL, USA)
2 out of 9 found this review helpful
Claire Tomalin is a superb biographer. She has great compassion for her subjects, even when they are all too human and flawed. I loved her biography of Dorothy Jordon -- Mrs. Jordan's Profession -- and I love this one of Thomas Hardy.
Hardy was a complex, enigmatic, flawed human being. He was much like us but, unlike us, supremely talented. His novels resonate, and his poetry -- which I was previously unfamiliar with -- is superb.
I had not read Hardy in years but this biography makes me want to go back and re-read Far From The Madding Crowd (my favorite), Two On A Tower (an early work I quite enjoyed), The Return Of The Native, and Tess Of The D'Urbervilles. (Jude The Obscure was so tragic I cannot force myself to go back to it.) I will also be looking for collections of his poetry. (I will also look for the Pepys biography that won -- what was it? -- the Whitbread Prize?)
Many of the assumptions I had about Hardy -- and please note that I was an English Lit major in university -- were blown to pieces by Tomalin's fine biography, and I am glad of it.
Highly, highly recommended.
Jo Manning, also a biographer (and novelist) and well aware of how difficult it is to write the story of another human being's life; I wrote My Lady Scandalous, the life of Grace Dalrymple Elliott, who was a royal courtesan (Simon & Schuster 2005)
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