Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited

Rating:
Summary: Definitive Thomas Hardy.
Review: Michael Millgate knows his Hardy. After all, he is perhaps the world's leading Thomas Hardy scholar. After publishing his Hardy biography in 1982, Professor Millgate went on to edit the COLLECTED LETTERS OF THOMAS HARDY 1926-27 (1988) and THOMAS HARDY: SELECTED LETTERS (1990). Those letters contained new information about Hardy, which Millgate incorporates into this fully revised, definitive new study of Hardy's life and work.

Because Hardy was such an intensely private person who carefully guarded the pariculars of his life, examining his life in detail was clearly no easy task. However, Millgate not only triumphs in bringing his subject to life in this 625-page biography, but also succeeds in demonstrating that "numerous aspects of A PAIR OF BLUE EYES, UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE, and even FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD are clearly autobiographical, and the later evidence of THE WOODLANDERS, TESS OF THE DURBERVILLES, and JUDE urges the conclusion that Hardy's best work tended to have strong and specific roots in his own background and experience" (pp. 186-7). Millgate follows the life of Thomas Hardy from his "solitary" and "remarkably uneventful" childhood (p. 39) in Bockhampton, to his architectural studies (p. 55), through his his difficult marriage to his first wife, Emma (an agnostic woman who became bleakly evangelical--much like Sue Brideshead in JUDE), to his transition from "pessimistic" novelist to an esteemed poet in his later years. Along the way, in his careful analysis of Hardy's writing, Millgate shows that Hardy was a "Pessimistic Meliorist" (p. 378), who "could see only an incomprehensible and probably meaningless universe," but who also "cared deeply about the human condition, perceived value in individual lives, asserted such traditional and Christian values as charity and what he liked to call 'loving kindness,' and thought that things could and indeed get better" (p. 379).

For those, like me, who are fascinated with Thomas Hardy and his novels, this equally fascinating biography should be considered required reading.

G. Merritt