Michael Millgate's classic biography of the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was first published in 1982. Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably expanded new edition the world's leading Hardy scholar draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative, and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited is now the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.

About the Author
Michael Millgate was born in Hampshire, studied at the universities of Cambridge, Michigan, and Leeds, and has now retired from the University of Toronto as University Professor of English Emeritus. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal society of Canada, he is best known for The Achievement of William Faulkner (1966) and other studies of American literature and for his extensive critical, biographical, and editorial work on Thomas Hardy, begun with Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971, reissued in 1994) and continued with Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982) and numerous scholarly editions of texts and documents. His editing of Hardy's ghost-written The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (1985) prompted the wider exploration of authorial wills and literary estates published in 1992 as Testamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy.

Reviews
...the updated work is likely to be the standard biography for at least another twenty years. * Noah Heringman, Studies in English Literature *



Book Information
ISBN 9780199275663
Author Michael Millgate
Format Paperback
Page Count 640
Imprint Oxford University Press
Publisher Oxford University Press
Weight(grams) 1g
Dimensions(mm) 234mm * 155mm * 38mm