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Thomas Hardy  By  cover art

Thomas Hardy

By: Claire Tomalin
Narrated by: David Shaw-Parker, Jill Balcon
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Publisher's summary

Penguin presents the audiobook edition of Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin, read by Jill Balcon and David Shaw-Parker.

Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the 20th-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; and he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats.

In the hands of Whitbread Award-winning biographer Claire Tomalin, author of the best-selling books Charles Dickens: A Life and The Invisible Woman, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come vividly alive. 

©2007 Claire Tomalin (P)2018 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"An extraordinary story, beautifully told. Tomalin is the most empathetic of biographers." (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday)

"Another triumph for a biographer who goes from strength to strength." (Melvyn Bragg, Guardian, Books of the Year)

"Tomalin provides an object lesson in how to write a life." (Economist)

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Great Novelist But A Boring Life

I have to disagree with the majority of reviewers on this one. However prolific a biographer Tomalin is, Hardy lived a fairy average, dull, life, and this biography failed to satisfy my curiosity about Hardy's subjectivity and his philosophy of writing. I listened to and enjoyed her biographies of Dickens and Bronte, but Hardy and his satellites came across dry, middle-class, windbags. Having said this, its the only Hardy biography on audible, so half an eye is better than no eye.

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