To hear a recording of this lecture 

Thomas Hardy, one of this country's greatest writers, won a world reputation as a novelist in the nineteenth century only to set fiction aside and make a new career as a poet in the twentieth. Through his novels he made fierce attacks on the class system, religion and marriage, but in his life he observed the proprieties as a conventional Victorian: respectful of royalty, becoming a J.P., spending the summer months of the Season regularly in London and enjoying the company of the aristocracy. When the wife from whom he had been long estranged died, he grieved for her, and celebrated his love for her in a series of magnificent poems. These are some of the paradoxes explored in Claire Tomalin’s biography Thomas Hardy: The Time Torn Man.

Hardy was a man whom contemporaries found difficult to know. Shy, reserved, rather stiff and nervous of physical contact, this is nonetheless a man whose writing scandalized with its sexual frankness and condemnation of class inequality.  In her biography Claire Tomalin has taken us to the heart of the contradictions of Hardy’s life to provide the fullest portrait yet of a fascinating man and a great artist of the modern age.