iosephvs bibliothecarivs’s Reviews > Thomas Hardy > Status Update

'If he went to church, he explained that it was not "because he believed in it, which he did not, but because it was good for the people to get clean and come together once a week - like discipline in the army."'

'The problem of who was to live at Max Gate apart from ghosts remained.'

A wonderful sentence conveying the truth of the complicated situation at Hardy's house after the death of his first wife and displaying Tomalin's great skill as a popular biographer.

On Oct 30, 2024, I accidentally left this book in Los Angeles. It was easily replaceable but the Stonehenge bookmark from our first trip to England was not. Thanks to my cousin Summer, both book and bookmark arrived back at my house in Utah on Apr 26, 2025!

'[Hardy] could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some.'

'[Hardy] went several times to hear Dickens read... and to hear John Stuart Mill speak on the hustings, and to the House of Commons to listen to Lord Palmerston. When Palmerston died, he got tickets for the funeral in Westminster Abbey, very conscious of the fact that the great man had stood in the House with Pitt, Fox, Sheridan and Burke. It was the personal link always that stirred Hardy's interest in history.'

Prologue p. xxii-xxiii: 'There is rising excitement in the writing as of someone making discoveries. He has found the most perfect subject he has ever had, and he has the skills to work on it.' 3/3

Prologue p. xxii-xxiii: '[As a poet] he is like an archeologist uncovering objects that have not been seen for many decades, bringing them into the light, examining them, some small pieces, some curious bones and broken bits, and some shining treasures.' 2/

Prologue p. xxii-xxiii: 'Hardy was a writer who made many of his best efforts out of incidents and stories he had collected and put aside, sights stored up, feelings he had kept to himself, anger he had not shown to the world. 1/