Publisher's Synopsis
Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world-wide reputation. He was a man of paradoxes: a believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower. From the poverty of rural Dorset to his resting place in Westminster Abbey, leading biographer Claire Tomalin covers Hardy's illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling novelist, and in later life, his supreme achievements as a poet.
