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“thomas hardy was one of the great victorian novelists – and also one of the great twentieth-century poets. this is the first of the many paradoxes he presents. he was a believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower; a driven man who ended his days in simplicity and serenity. born in 1840, he could recall his grandmother telling him she was ironing her muslin frock when she first heard that the french queen’s head had been cut off in the 1790s, yet he lived to know winston churchill and harold macmillan.” “he grew up in one of the most remote parts of the country, the son of a village builder and a girl who had gone into service as a child. his first book was a raging novel attacking the upper classes, judged too mischievous to publish, and his last two novels were also angry protests against the rigid class system and narrow moral code of the english. yet by this time he had been taken up by the aristocracy and danced attendance eagerly on the landed gentry and their ladies.” “he wrote classic accounts of the beauty of the countryside and the traditions of village life, but every spring he chose to leave dorset and spend the summer months in london for the season. while his wife, emma, lived, he wrote hardly a line of verse about her. only after her death did he devote himself to poems of love and regret. depression came so sharply to him that he sometimes said it would be better not to have been born. but in a moment, music, falling in love with a pretty face or seeing the view from a high point over the dorset hills could spring him out of the gloom.”–book jacket.