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Winter

Christopher Nicholson

Start date: March 1, 2021

Finish date: May 31, 2021

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Apr 26, 2021 Connie G rated it really liked it

Shelves: books-about-books, england, historical-fiction, literary-fiction, thomas-hardy

Thomas Hardy, novelist and poet, was living his last years in rural southwestern England with his second wife, Florence. Thomas, 84, and Florence, 45, are childless but dote on their terrier, Wessex. It is 1924, but Thomas does not want to own any new inventions such as a car or electricity although he can easily afford it. Florence spends her day managing the household, answering correspondence for her husband, and writing his biography while Thomas spends time daily writing poetry. The chillin ...more

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Jan 17, 2021 Elizabeth (Alaska) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: kindle, twenty-first-century, 5-star-reads, from-friends, author-biography, author-hardy-thomas

He gave me a particular look, a look that I have come to know well, intended to convey the message that he was impervious to all argument, however reasonable.
This is not a humorous book, but I couldn't help myself in highlighting this sentence. For years, comedians have referred to wives giving husbands "the look". I simply want to make note of the fact that wives have been on the receiving end of the look, too. Thank you Christopher Nicholson for acknowledging that fact.

The Goodreads descri

He gave me a particular look, a look that I have come to know well, intended to convey the message that he was impervious to all argument, however reasonable.
This is not a humorous book, but I couldn't help myself in highlighting this sentence. For years, comedians have referred to wives giving husbands "the look". I simply want to make note of the fact that wives have been on the receiving end of the look, too. Thank you Christopher Nicholson for acknowledging that fact.

The Goodreads description accurately tells us that the novel is told from three points of view: Thomas Hardy, his second wife, Florence, and the young woman Gertrude Bugler who plays Tess in the amateur theater group The Hardy Players. The novel takes place in the Winter of the year Thomas Hardy is eighty-four, about 1924 or 1925. The characters look back from that vantage point, and sometimes nto the future.

The several sections/chapters told by Florence and the two chapters told by Gertie are in the first person. I think Nicholson does a good job of writing from the viewpoint of a woman and making clear which woman is telling the story. Florence is simply a shrew of a woman. I don't mean that she is domineering at all. Instead she is an A Number One whiner without a shred of self esteem or self-confidence. In these chapters I found Hardy to be long suffering. Florence, of course, thought her self long suffering and through this apparently self same attitude the novel is brought to a climax. Gertie is a young woman who simply wants to be an actress. She has played the lead in several of the Hardy plays to date.

The chapters with the point of view of Thomas Hardy - about half of the novel - are told in the third person. Nicholson did a fair imitation of Hardy's writing style in these. Though in the third person, we see how Hardy looks at the world. We are privileged to view the fields, the birds, the sky, just as Hardy writes. We also come to know about some of those who have peopled his life and how he views his writing. This quote is very early in the book and I could have highlighted many more such paragraphs.

Her hair was a conspicuous feature; thick and very black, with tresses that shone in the light of the fire, it was the kind of hair that in a former age might have adorned the head of a Cleopatra or a Helen of Troy, and a man with an imaginative cast of mind might have wished himself transmuted into a comb, merely for the pleasure of being drawn through its length.

I woke up last night and couldn't get back to sleep. I was glad to have 40 or 50 pages left to read. It is not a flashy novel and I was very glad for the quietness of the Hardy sections in particular. This novel reminded me that I have more Hardy to read. I hope I get to them without letting too much time pass. 5-stars, although it's probably in the lower 1/4 of that group.

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