Author Description

Thomas Hardy, born in rural obscurity in early Victorian Dorset, had become by the time of his death more than eighty years later the most famous writer in the English-speaking world. These fascinating letters provide an invaluable look into his life from the years as an unknown architect's assistant in London in the 1860s to the final period of amazing old-age productivity in the relative isolation of Max Gate. More than 300 letters, selected from the seven-volume Clarendon Press edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, emphasize his personal rather than his purely professional relationships. They include correspondence with his family, his two wives, and close friends Edmund Gosse and Florence Henniker, and address other notable figures, among them Walter de la Mare, Millicent Fawcett, Harley Granville Barker, Ezra Pound, Marie Stopes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Virginia Woolf. Millgate provides annotations and editorial commentaries to individual letters or sequences of letters to place them within the broader contexts of Hardy's life and literary career.