Selected Letters - Hardcover

Hardy, Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0198185464 ISBN 13: 9780198185468

Publisher: Oxford University Press, 1990

Synopsis

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.

About this title

Review

'Selected Letters is an admirable feat of compression, distilling from the seven-volume Collected Letters of over 2000 pages a representative selection spanning a long life, which will be useful to the scholar and appealing to Hardy enthusiasts. Professor Millgate has almost unerringly selected the 'best' letters - best written, or most revealing ... For those who may share Hardy's reservation the Selected Letters provide a happy and dependable alternative to the seven-volume strata from which they have been so knowledgeably and skilfully quarried.' Michael Thorpe, Mount Allison University, English Studies, Volume 73, Number 3, June 1992 `Michael Millgate's edition of Selected Letters is especially welcome and very useful. This neat volume gathers more than three hundred letters from the seven-volume Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy ... Each letter has admirable footnoting to explain puzzling references, and the whole is a model of ease of use and attractiveness ... the letters are invalulable in their own way, and Millgate's selection will not be superseded for quite some time.' Notes and Queries 'a well-chosen selection ... this volume offers a number of helpful bridge passages of biographical summary and commentary together with explanatory notes that are nicely succinct ... As characteristic expressions of a major literary figure they are essential for all libraries.' E.F. Harden, Simon Fraser University, Choice, Dec '90 'This selection is carefully chosen, elegantly edited, and beautifully produced. Recommended - in short - without reservation of any kind.' Thomas Hardy Journal (February 1991) `excellently chosen and edited by Michael Millgate' Sylvia Clayton, Guardian `They have received exemplary care from Michael Millgate. His commentary, notes and thoughtful index do much to assist the reader's imagination in re-creating the larger context of history and experience, out of which these gritty and taciturned writings have been wrested.' Adrian Poole, Sunday Correspondent `This selection is carefully chosen, elegantly edited, and beautifully produced. Recommended - in short - without reservation of any kind.' Timothy Hands, Thomas Hardy Journal `...excellently chosen and edited by Michael Millgate...' Sylvia Clayton, Guardian 'In their condensed form, they are utterly absorbing. Michael Millgate has pruned Hardy ... without distorting his shape,...' Andrew Motion, Sunday Observer From reviews of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy edited by Michael Millgate in collaboration with Richard L. Purdy (OUP, seven volumes, 1978-1988) `will rank among the highest achievements of literary scholarship' Desmond Hawkins, Contemporary Review `has the qualities that a great edition should have ... I do not see how it could have been done better.' Samuel Hynes, Times Literary Supplement

Edition details

• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0198185464
• ISBN 13: 9780198185468
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 462
• Editor: Millgate Michael