Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man

"A masterful portrait" (The Philadelphia Inquirer) from a Whitbread Award-winning biographer

The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a gr…