On the menu of great literary lives, Thomas Hardy is a tough egg. Almost a century after his death, it’s hard to fully conjure, still less quite to comprehend, the spell his novels exerted over his ...

As I open Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy biography, I anticipate a good read. I'm an admirer of Tomalin's previous biographies (Jane Austen and Samuel Pepys, among them). I know the Penguin Press ...

Embed <iframe src="https://www.npr.org/player/embed/6955344/6955347" width="100%" height="290" frameborder="0" scrolling="no" title="NPR embedded audio player"> A ...

In 1912, when he was 72, Thomas Hardy began to write a series of love poems about his wife, Emma. The poems were unlikely for several reasons. First, for years he and Emma had been estranged, and she ...

Thomas Hardy (2 June, 1840 – 11 January, 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by ...