Thomas Hardy By Claire Tomalin,

 Thomas Hardy By [Hardy, Thomas] Tomalin, Claire   "A masterful portrait" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographerThe novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every book lover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband, and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to re-establish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.