Michael millgate thomas hardy biography for kids
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. New York, Random House, 1982 ; one vol., xvi-637 pp. Price : £ 25.00. -Thomas Hardy's growing popularity with modern readership has recently been matched by an increasing scholarly interest in his works and
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person. Since J. O. Bailey's pioneering study of The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (1970) we have seen a spate of first-class publications on this great Victorian, including several editions of his correspondence and personal notebooks. Professor Michael Millgate's biography of Hardy does not come as a surprise. His recognition as a prominent Hardy authority dates from 1971 when he published Thomas Hardy .· His Career as a Novelist. Then, too, his co-editorship of the Clarendon Press Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (1978) has enabled him to unearth a mine of documents which shed fresh sidelight on Hardy's life, personality, and literary achievements. Put at its simplest, it is this availability of new material that has allowed Millgate to present a profile of Hardy f
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Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography
Abstract
For a man who lived most of his life within a narrow geographical area, and who managed to avoid the melodramatic incidents that distinguished the careers of more bohemian contemporaries, Thomas Hardy has managed to attract the attention of a surprisingly large number of biographers and gossips. The fact that he was responsible for much of the text of Florence Emily Hardy’s ‘life’, and sought to re-direct the attention of posterity to those aspects of his career in which he took greatest pride, has been interpreted by some critics of the post-war generation as somewhat sinister, or at least as an unfair concealment of events and human relationships. (Hardy’s hand in the writing of his third-person autobiography was never well-concealed; several knew the secret even before Hardy died; and anyone familiar with the standard Victorian life-and-letters treatment of a recently-deceased writer may note, by contrast, Hardy’s candour
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Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited
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