Michael Millgate's classic biography of the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy was first published in 1982. Much new information about Hardy has since become available, often in volumes edited or co-edited by Millgate himself, and many established assumptions have been challenged and revolutionized by scholarly research. In this extensively revised, fully reconsidered, and considerably expanded new edition the world's leading Hardy scholar draws not only upon these new materials but upon an exceptional understanding of Hardy gained from long immersion in the study of his life and work. Many large and small aspects of Hardy's life are here freshly illuminated, including his family background, his fumbling self-education as a poet, his difficult relations with his first wife and hers with his family, his sexual infatuations, his secret collaborations with aspiring women writers, his clandestine composition of his own official biography, and the memory-invoking techniques by which he sustained his remarkable creativity into extreme old age. Thorough, authoritative, and eminently readable, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited is now the standard life of Hardy for a new generation.

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Michael Millgate was born in Hampshire, studied at the universities of Cambridge, Michigan, and Leeds, and has now retired from the University of Toronto as University Professor of English Emeritus. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the Royal society of Canada, he is best known for iThe Achievement of William Faulkner/i (1966) and other studies of American literature and for his extensive critical, biographical, and editorial work on Thomas Hardy, begun with iThomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist/i (1971, reissued in 1994) and continued with iThomas Hardy: A Biography/i (1982) and numerous scholarly editions of texts and documents. His editing of Hardy's ghost-written iThe Life and Work of Thomas Hardy/i (1985) prompted the wider exploration of authorial wills and literary estates published in 1992 as iTestamentary Acts: Browning, Tennyson, James, Hardy/i.

The definitive work for a least a generation

'A splendid biography . . . Millgate is the kind of biographer who writers dream of. He gives us all the necessary details, but none of the gratuitous ones.' New York Times

'By its calm and judicial treatment of the new material, Millgate's biography does credit to the integrity and judgement of all concerned. . . . A superb work of scholarship.' Listener

'There has been no better account of the genesis and production of the novels, and of the magnitude of both the achievement and the cost.' New Statesman

'Review from previous edition The standard biography, indispensable to all who covet the particulars of Hardy's life.' Times Higher Education Supplement

'By far the most detailed and comprehensive account of Hardy's personal and literary life now available.' Times Literary Supplement