Catherine Peters
Epitaph on a Pessimist
Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life
By Ralph Pite
Picador 741pp £25
He had grown up in a house where nothing was said about what really mattered – where history filled the silence and annals of the parish supplanted personal lives. He grew used to secrets; he absorbed habitual strategies of self-control.
Ralph Pite’s new biography explores Hardy through his famous reticence, which Pite sees as his way of resisting definition and entrapment; a strategy learned so early in life that it became an inescapable part of his nature. Writing became Hardy’s substitute for personal relationships. His first wife Emma wrote bitterly, ‘he understands only the women he invents – the others not at all’. By his middle years Hardy was so entrenched behind these self-imposed barriers, that any intimacy threatened him. A passionate man who was subject to recurrent, unconsummated infatuations with much younger women, he would retreat into disillusionment before things could get out of hand. A guarded life indeed.
Pite fingers the usual suspects, Hardy’s parents. Locked in a shotgun marriage that neither of them wanted (Hardy was born five and a half months after the ceremony), Hardy’s father went his own way, and his fiercely intelligent mother, who had been brought up in deep poverty, concentrated her formidable
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
London's East End was long synonymous with poverty and sweatshops, while its West End was associated with glamour and high society. But when it came to the fashion industry, were the differences really so profound?
Sharman Kadish - Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers
Sharman Kadish: Winkle-pickers & Bum Freezers - Fashion City: How Jewish Londoners Shaped Global Style; Fashion City: ...
literaryreview.co.uk
In 1982, Donald Rumsfeld presented Saddam Hussein with a pair of golden spurs. Two decades later he was dropping bunker-busting bombs on his palaces.
Where did the US-Iraqi relationship go wrong?
Rory Mccarthy - The Case of the Vanishing Missiles
Rory Mccarthy: The Case of the Vanishing Missiles - The Achilles Trap: Saddam Hussein, the United States and the ...
literaryreview.co.uk
Barbara Comyns was a dog breeder, a house painter, a piano restorer, a landlady... And a novelist.
@nclarke14 on the lengths 20th-century women writers had to go to make ends meet:
Norma Clarke - Her Family & Other Animals
Norma Clarke: Her Family & Other Animals - Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner
literaryreview.co.uk