Thomas Hardy, the most devious of men, left a number of minefields and boobytraps for his future biographers. But he has mel his match in Michael Millgate, author of Thomas Hardy: His career as a novelist (1971) and co-editor of Hardy’ s Collected Letters, who has now produced a mammoth academic biography. Henry James, who foresaw the way modem biography would develop (but failed to avoid Leon Edel’ s scalpel himself) observed that ‘ the cunning of the inquirer … will exceed in subtlety and ferocity anything we today conceive’ ; and he warned ‘ the pale victim’ that he would only be safe from posterity ‘ with every track covered, every paper burnt and every letter unanswered.’

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