Thomas Hardy

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Standard Name: Hardy, Thomas
TH was a poet by vocation and became a novelist by profession. The Wessex of his novels has made him arguably a regional novelist. As well as a prolific output in both these forms, he published a unique verse epic bringing together human and supernatural characters, short fiction, a volume for children, and two volumes of actual autobiography masquerading as a biography by his second wife. Since his career as a publishing novelist ran from the 1870s to the 1890s, and his first volume of poetry post-dated his final novel, he has been seen as a Victorian novelist but a mostly twentieth-century poet. This description, however, is not true to the facts of composition. He wrote poetry from early in his life, but did not publish it in volume form until his final novel.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
death Charlotte Mew
The day before she died, CM gave Alida Monro a cherished copy of her poem Fin de Fête, the one transcribed in the British Library by Thomas Hardy .
Monro, Alida, and Charlotte Mew. “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir”. Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew, Gerald Duckworth, 1953, p. vii - xx.
xii
Dedications Mary Webb
She had finished this book towards the end of the previous year, and dedicated it by permission to Thomas Hardy .
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press, 1990.
36
Education Cecily Mackworth
She was at first educated at home by thirteen successive governesses. Her mother sometimes read aloud to her daughters: R. D. Blackmore ' Lorna Doone and Anna Sewell 's Black Beauty. After meeting Hardy
Education Margaret Atwood
She attended elementary school, and then from 1952 Leaside High School in Toronto, both in the Protestant public school system operating in Ontario alongside a Catholic one. She and her schoolmates got prayers and...
Education Ann Quin
Yet at this time books discovered in the public library taught her the possibilities in writing: Greek and Elizabethan dramatists. Dostoievsky (Crime and Punishment and Virginia Woolf 's The Waves . ....
Education Elizabeth Taylor
Betty Coles's first reading was Beatrix Potter , then Lewis CarrollAlice in Wonderland and E. Nesbit , whose Bastable stories she read over and over again. Though her parents were not bookish people she progressed at...
Education Ruth Prawer Jhabvala
She read voraciously, preferring writers with the geographical rootedness which she herself lacked: George Eliot , Thomas Hardy , Charles Dickens , and from beyond the English tradition Marcel Proust , James Joyce , Henry James
Education Joan Riley
As a young child in Jamaica, JR says she found escape from the harsh realities of her life on the shelves of the local library. Reading whatever was available, she ranged from Shakespeare to...
Education Viola Meynell
After leaving school at sixteen, VM read widely on her own, especially English authors: George Eliot , Dickens , George Meredith , Arnold Bennett , John Galsworthy , and Thomas Hardy .
MacKenzie, Raymond N. A Critical Biography of English Novelist Viola Meynell, 1885-1956. Edwin Mellen, 2002.
61, 65
Family and Intimate relationships Anne Stevenson
She found motherhood a struggle. She tried to keep up her serious reading (James , Hardy , Proust ) while breast-feeding, and to serve an elegant candlelit supper each evening while the baby cried...
Family and Intimate relationships Adelaide Procter
AP 's mother, born Anne Skepper , was a clever and observant woman, a frequent and influential hostess to the London literary elite. Frances Kemble considered her notable for her pungent epigrams and brilliant sallies...
Family and Intimate relationships Virginia Woolf
VW 's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a Victorian philosopher and historian of ideas . . . literary historian and critic, and—perhaps most important—a biographer.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, 1983, pp. 32 -56.
36
Mark Hussey writes that he was, after Matthew Arnold
Family and Intimate relationships Virginia Woolf
He was immensely influential. As editor of the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882, he published Henry James , Thomas Hardy , Matthew Arnold , Robert Browning , and George Meredith , among others.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, 1983, pp. 32 -56.
34
Family and Intimate relationships Iris Tree
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm was IT 's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote...
Family and Intimate relationships Q. D. Leavis
The Roths were devastated by their daughter's decision to marry a gentile. They disowned her and ceased to give her any financial support. However, this period had its happy moments as well. Q. D. introduced...

Timeline

1876
John Maxwell sold Belgravia to Chatto and Windus , ending Mary Elizabeth Braddon 's association with the monthly.
October 1877
Charles Kegan Paul arranged to purchase the publishing firm of his employer H. S. King to form Kegan Paul and Co.
May 1893
The Pall Mall Magazine began monthly publication; it ran until September 1914.
2 September 1914
The British War Propaganda Bureau (newly formed along the lines of a similar body in Germany) summoned twenty-five writers to discuss the production of texts that would boost national feeling and the war effort.
1952
The seventy-eight-year-old Somerset Maugham confided to his former headmaster that he believed that the Order of Merit was something that they ought to award him, as the greatest living writer of English.
June 1966
AnthropologistMary Douglas published her best-known work, Purity and Danger, a study of ritual behaviour and taboo.