Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Emma complained that he cared more for the women he imagined than for any real woman.
-- Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy (The Penguin Press, 2007)

Emma was Thomas Hardy's first wife, from whom he was psychologically estranged most of her life. When she died Hardy remarried, at the age of 74, and spent time writing poetry about Emma and how sorry he was that their love did not last.  Hardy became quite wealthy from writing novels but turned to poetry when Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895) were attacked as vulgar and pessimistic.  I have come to reading Hardy late in life, perhaps, to his credit, because his novels don't fit into any neat category:  too Victorian and Edwardian for many readers, too modern for others, though some of his novels continue to be made into movies.

One won't learn from Tomalin's book how to appreciate Hardy's rich and complex novels.  She does have intelligent interpretations of the books and the poetry but ultimately her book is a biography and not a work of literary criticism.  Hardy did not attend university and started out as an architecture clerk; suddenly he decided to write and worked hard at it, even though he had to pay to have his first two novels --Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) -- published.  They sold well enough so that he became a full-time writer, publishing a new novel every year or two for the next twenty-six years.  I've often said that I read biographies to see if there are any secrets to artistic and personal success and it often comes down to the same things that helped make Hardy successful:  perseverance and hard work.

If you are not familiar with Hardy's novels I suggest you read them before you read Tomalin's book, intelligent and witty as it is.  Tomalin will tell you a great deal about life in London and Dorset during Hardy's lifetime but one can only learn about Hardy and his thoughts --fatalistic, class conscious, interested in the bright and dark sides of nature -- in his beautifully written novels and poetry.