Thomas Hardy is one of the sacred figures in English writing, a great poet and a novelist with a world reputation. His life was also extraordinary: from the poverty of rural Dorset he went on to become the Grand Old Man of English life and letters, his last resting place in Westminster Abbey. This seminal biography, by our leading biographer, covers Hardy’s illegitimate birth, his rural upbringing, his escape to London in the 1860s, his marriages, his status as a bestselling novelist, and in later life, his supreme achievements as a poet.

The Poems of Thomas Hardy as selected by Claire Tomalin are now available in paperback. Read more here.

Claire Tomalin talks about her prolific biography-writing.  Her latest subject is Thomas Hardy in Thomas Hardy: The Time-torn Man (published by Penguin)

1. You are widely regarded as a pre-eminent biographer of your generation. Do you find you choose your subjects or do your subjects choose you, as it were?

I've chosen almost all my own subjects.  I was asked to take on Katherine Mansfield and hesitated.  I found her engrossing, but I am less fond of that book because it cost me terrible efforts and I had ambivalent feelings about the subject.  I admire her courage and boldness, and the best of her writing is wonderful in its concision and swiftness.  But I had reservations about some of the stories, and about the sort of cult of her saintliness that Middleton Murray set up, which seemed to me to do a disservice to the real, tough, complicated Mansfield.  Wollstonecraft was my own cherished subject.  She led fairly naturally to the other late 18th-century women I have written about (and also to the small book on Shelley, and much later to my edition of Mary Shelley's 'Maurice').  Nelly Ternan, my 'Invisible Woman', also led me to research the lives of actresses, which was another route towards Mrs Jordan, with whom Nelly's mother acted.  My big leap in the dark was into the 17th century.  I became absorbed in Pepys slowly, through reading his diaries as the Matthews & Latham edition came out.  I also felt I had unfinished business, since I studied the civil wars at school and was rather firmly persuaded to give up the idea of reading history at university in favour of English literature.  But history is my real love, and I regret not writing more general history.  I believe context is always as important as the thread of the life story you are telling, and with Pepys I had an opportunity to work my way through a lot of 17th century background reading.  I'd like to go back to the 17th century for another book if possible.  As for Hardy, I admire him profoundly as a poet, and find his novels extraordinarily intriguing in different ways.  His life is quite dark, with much struggle and unhappiness, but he did emerge into the sunlight in the end with his poetry and the appreciation of younger poets.

2. T.S. Eliot once wrote there is a difference, in art, between the “man who suffers and the mind that creates”. For him it followed that readers should not look to the author’s life to better understand his work.  As a literary biographer, what do you make of this claim?  Can biography help us penetrate the mysteries of great books?

Eliot, great poet and critic that he was, was also one of the great disapprovers of biography, and after him scores of carping academics have repeated his dictum and shaken their heads at the form.  I don't for a moment think that biography 'penetrates the mystery of great books' or explains why Mozart or Austen or Shakespeare was a genius.  Nobody can explain that.  But I see nothing wrong in noting down what is known of their lives.  Even Eliot presumably accepted that it was all right to know birth and death dates, nationality, residences, illnesses... a few basics.  So why should it be wrong to know dates of marriage and divorce - occupation of parents - education - political affiliations - and so on?  It's a sort of snobbery to say these things don't matter.  Of course they matter.

3. Hardy lived at the intersection of two different worlds – one vanishing and just coming into being.  Your book pays careful attention to the social and historical contexts that shaped him, so where do biography and history meet?

As I said earlier, the historical context has always seemed an essential part of constructing any biography (I've never wanted to write about a living subject).  It's one of the great attractions and rewards of the work, delving into politics, economics, art history, medical history, theatre history, royal history, child-rearing and schooling, transport, architecture, agriculture and so on.  Historians will handle a much wider range of sources than a biographer, and will be covering a broader spectrum of events, time, peoples.  Biographers use historians more than historians use biographers, although there can be two-way traffic - e.g., the ever growing production of biographies of women is helping to change the general picture of the past presented by historians.

4. One of your central claims, as I take it, is that Hardy was constantly trying to recover something in the past which was unrecoverable.  What part does this play in our continued interest in him both as a historical figure and literary genius?

I used to think that what made Hardy attractive was that he gave us a lost past, but I'm not sure about that any more.  What makes the poetry so good is the voice, awkward, absolutely individual, that reports on what he sees, what he feels, the sort of conversations he has in his head with (mostly) dead people or with unknown, unnamed figures.  Thom Gunn said Hardy was much inspired by the ballads he knew as a boy, and that's certainly true.  He writes so boldly, takes such chances with the prosody, varies his style from music hall ('The Ruined Maid') to modernist ('Snow in the Suburbs') to surrealist ('During Wind and Rain').  The range is wonderful - from the railway waiting room where the emigrant family is to the fallow deer in the snow, from grim recall of a failed love affair ('Neutral Tones') to flirtation ('The Terra-cotta Dress'), from tormenting self-pity ('Wessex Heights') to exuberance.  'The Convergence of the Twain' is an amazing poem, and 'The Dead Drummer' is a small, classic lament for a soldier killed overseas.  As to the novels - Jude of course shows the old rural life broken, and Tess shows it breaking.  The Mayor of Casterbridge, a tragedy, shows it changing too.  So does The Woodlanders.  Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd are the two that celebrate it most, although there is change indicated in them too.  Hardy knew the past was irrecoverable, just as his Christian faith was, and although he wrote tenderly of what it had meant he did not pretend it still prevailed. I like his honesty.

5.  It has been argued that we read to “confront greatness”.  Do we read biography, then, to see its machinery?

Why do we read biography?  Why do we choose to write it?  Because we are human beings, programmed to be curious about other human beings, and to experience something of their lives.  This has always been so - look at the Bible, crammed with biographies, very popular reading.  People take what they want from a biography, and I get some shocks sometimes when they tell me what they have concluded from what I have written.  Mostly they find their existing prejudices confirmed.  I like to be surprised when I research, and it has happened often enough, so that just when I think I am learning to understand a particular person, something that makes them seem different again crops up.  In Hardy I have tried to explain how it came about that he decided to write the sort of books publishers and editors wanted rather than what he wanted to write - he understood that he had to get published in the first place if he was to earn his living as a writer.  He did not have the instant success of Dickens, but a struggle.  The result is that it is easy to find fault with the novels, overloaded with plot, often hastily and sometimes carelessly written - Hardy did not polish his prose, he got the work to the publisher or editor as fast as he could.  What is surprising is how much there is in them in spite of this that is good and vivid and odd and memorable.  All the people I have written about remain with me - perhaps they are my closest friends.