Hardy - Hardcover

Martin Seymour-Smith

3.86

14 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0747510377 ISBN 13: 9780747510376

Publisher: Bloomsbury, 1994

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Thomas Hardy has been seriously misinterpreted by his previous biographers, Robert Gittings and Michael Millgate, claims the author of this book, Martin Seymour-Smith. This biography establishes that the popular view of Thomas Hardy as a mean, snobbish, impotent pessimist who couldn't get on with women is wholly inaccurate. Hardy was in fact a shy, sensitive man who cared deeply about his fellow beings, including both his wives. The author also overturns the idea that Hardy was a naive amateur by pointing to his poetry which has been ignored by the critics since it was attacked by T.S. Eliot. Other work by the author includes "Who's Who in Twentieth-Century Literature" and the encyclopaedic four volume "Guide to Modern World Art", as well as biographies of Robert Graves and Rudyard Kipling.

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From Publishers Weekly:

Most biographers portray novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) as an awkward rustic who rose above his class. In this dense, overwritten but important biography, Seymour-Smith, by contrast, presents Hardy as a determined, confident literary man, a deep thinker who drew inspiration from Arthur Schopenhauer, Edmund Burke and Charles Fourier. Quoting liberally from poems, diaries and letters, Seymour-Smith (Guide to Modern World Literature) demolishes the image of Hardy as a sexually impotent misogynist fostered by biographers Michael Millgate and Robert Gittings. Hardy's first marriage, to Emma Gifford, was "much less disastrous" than is commonly believed, the author argues. He further maintains that Hardy loved both his wives and that, contrary to his previous biographers, Emma did not become insane after their breakup. Providing detailed critiques of the novels and of Hardy's epic Napoleonic drama The Dynasts (1901-1908), Seymour-Smith gives us a multifaceted Hardy-a novelist of feminist and comic sensibilities, anti-imperialist war poet, animal lover and pessimist-whose concept of a flawed Creator-God has parallels in gnosticism. Photos.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal:

British author Seymour-Smith's (Rudyard Kipling, LJ 2/1/90) focus is not so much on the critical evaluation of Hardy's works as on his life, especially his relations with his lovers and his not-always-happy marriages. This is not a Freudian or psychoanalytic biography but a revisionist one that argues, often acidly, against the portraits drawn by previous biographers (most notably Gittings and Millgate) to make its points. The author presents Hardy as a pessimistic thinker and communicating member of the established church whose highly complex creative and emotional life brought forth novelistic explorations of male and female sexuality that subverted the pieties of the time. Far from being naive, passive, impotent, or a misogynist, he was canny in managing his literary and business affairs and possessed a robust and healthy sexuality as well as a sense of humor. There is plenty of information and plausible interpretations here, but the argumentative tone (sometimes with little more than intuition as evidence) can be intrusive. For informed readers.
Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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