Young Thomas Hardy/ Thomas Hardy's Later Years

In this masterful two-volume biography we discover how Thomas Hardy's first thirty-five years represented a long series of lost loves and hesitations, in which can be found not only the major themes of his mature writing but also the elusive reasons that Hardy intentionally destroyed almost all evidence concerning his formative experiences. Through voluminous, ingenious original research, Robert Gittings explores the deep currents that ran beneath the surface of this shy and secretive man to emerge in the major novels of his middle age and in the poetry Hardy continued to write until his death. Dominated by the struggles that also preoccupied his youth - the concealment of his origins - Thomas Hardy's later years were crowded with the ironies and sadness that inform so much of his work. Illustrated with previously unpublished photographs and other material, Young Thomas Hardy and Thomas Hardy's Later Years are an outstanding dramatic narrative of the making of Hardy's genius.