Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life [Hardcover]

'Good value.'

"Ralph Pite's revealing biography of Thomas Hardy."

"The Guarded Life offers many excellent insights."

"Pite has caught his subject's eyes and held his gaze."

"[Pite's] sensation-by-sensation creation of Hardy's mind is a beautiful thing."

`Pite...has cleared the way for fresh inspiration to breathe life
into the study of his work.'

Few writers are as strongly associated with a particular place as Thomas Hardy. His role as unofficial historian of Wessex has come to define his reputation, yet it can only begin to accommodate the complexities of a man who overcame humble origins and went on to write some of the most popular, but also most vilified, novels of the Victorian period.

The Guarded Life challenges some of the long-held views of Hardy - did he spend all his early life in preparation for his career as a writer, and did his novels really come a distant second to his poetry in his heart? In his personal life, did his first wife, Emma Hardy, really trick him into marriage and was she the ambitious women her enemies have painted her as being? And what of Florence, his second wife, who has so often been caricatured in her conflicted and passionate feelings for Hardy? By examining the relationships and contexts that shaped Hardy most - the women, the friendships and mentors, the social and family pressures, the career structures and the Dorsetshire landscape - The Guarded Life reveals the personality and emotional life of a public figure who has despite his fame remained until now largely obscure.

Ralph Pite teaches English at the University of Cardiff. He has written critical studies of Hardy (Hardy's Geography, Palgrave, 2002),of Dante's influence on Romantic Poetry (The Circle of Our Vision, OUP, 1994), and a study of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Lives of the Great Romantics: Coleridge, Pickering & Chatto, 1997).