Thomas Hardy: Family History

Thomas Hardy's creative life, extending from the mid-Victorian period to the late 1920s, is longer than that of almost any other English witer.

But his roots were, and remained, in nineteenth-century rural Dorset, where he had grown up, and since his death it has become increasingly recognized that his work in prose and verse is deeply personal. Although Hardy himself vigorously (and sometimes bitterly) discouraged attempts to treat it as in any way autobiographical, it is now difficult to read his novels, stories and poems without perceiving in them a reflection of the vanished world that remained forever fresh in his memory.

Family bonds, local traditions and customs, beliefs, occupations and landscapes: all these helped to form the temperament and sensibility of the boy from an obscure Dorset hamlet who became the Grand Old Man of English letters and a writer who has retained an international appeal. These volumes bring together accounts of the world and the relationships that shaped Hardy's imagination: many of them long out of print and rare, they evoke the family background, personal relationships and provincial culture of his formative years, as well as the physical background of 'Wessex' that plays such a large part in his fiction and poetry.

Among the many topics covered are Dorset folklore and superstition, the proliferating Hardy clan, the family tradition of music-making, and Hardy's numerous homes from his birthplace to his final settling at Max Gate.

Among the voices heard, in addition to Hardy himself, are those of his first wife Emma, his second wife Florence, and his beloved sister Mary.

Selected by Norman Page, Hardy scholar and editor of The Oxford Reader's Companion to Thomas Hardy , this collection provides an invaluable amount of hard-to-find source material (including contemporary biographies and responses, pamphlets and journal articles) for any serious Hardy scholarship.