Selected Letters

by Thomas Hardy, Michael Millgate (Editor)

Thomas Hardy, born in rural obscurity in early Victorian Dorset, had become by the time of his death more than eighty years later the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. These fascinating letters provide an invaluable look into his life from the years as an unknown architect's assistant in London in the 1860s to the final period of amazing old-age productivity in the relative isolation of Max Gate. More than 300 letters, selected from the seven-volume Clarendon Press edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, emphasize his personal rather than his purely professional relationships. They include correspondence with his family, his two wives, and close friends Edmund Gosse and Florence Henniker, and address other notable figures, among them Walter de la Mare, Millicent Fawcett, Harley Granville Barker, Ezra Pound, Marie Stopes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Virginia Woolf. Millgate provides annotations and editorial commentaries to individual letters or sequences of letters to place them within the broader contexts of Hardy's life and literary career.

462 pages, Hardcover

First published May 31, 1990

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Maria Hrickova]

4.8