Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
Return of the Master
By Tim Parks
Thomas Hardy
by Claire Tomalin
Penguin, 486 pp., $35.00
'What has Providence done to Mr Hardy,' wrote a reviewer of the Victorian writer's novel Jude the Obscure (1895), 'that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?' The reviewer was referring to the long and painful series of misfortunes that befall Jude, culminating in the moment when his eldest child is found to have hanged his younger brother and sister and himself. So harrowing is the scene that the reviewer's cry for some explanation is understandable. But in her new biography of Hardy, Claire Tomalin declines to offer one. 'Neither Hardy nor anyone else,' she tells us, 'has explained where his black view of life came from.' Most of his time, after all, was spent working at his desk.
Review, 5363 words
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