One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography. But this is not the whole truth: Florence altered much of what Hardy meant to appear in his 'biography'. Through careful examination of pre- publication texts, Michael Millgate has retrieved the text as it stood at the time of Hardy's final revision. For the first time The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy can be read as a true work of autobiography - an addition to the Hardy canon.

Thomas Hardy's "Poetical Matter" notebook, the last to be published from among the small group of notebooks not destroyed by Hardy himself or by his executors, has now been meticulously edited with full scholarly annotation. Through its inclusion of so many notes copied by Hardy from old pocket-books subsequently destroyed, "Poetical Matter" reaches back to all periods of his life, and is especially valuable from a biographical standpoint for its expansion and enhancement of knowledge of Hardy's final years and for its preservation of such intimate records as his richly revealing memories of the Bockhampton of his childhood and his sexually charged impressions of a woman glimpsed during a trip on a pleasure steamer in 1868. Its special distinctiveness nevertheless lies in its uniqueness as a late working notebook devoted specifically to verse. Florence Hardy, Hardy's widow, recalled his having experienced a great outburst of late creativity, feeling that he could go on writing almost indefinitely, and "Poetical Matter" bears direct witness to his actively thinking about poetry and projecting and composing new poems until shortly before his death at the age of eighty-seven. As such, it contains an abundance of new ideas for poems and sequences of poems and demonstrates Hardy's characteristic creative progression, his working variously with initial ideas, with gathered notes, whether old or new, and with tentative prose formulations, verse fragments, metrical schemes, and rhyme patterns, towards the writing of the drafts from which, yet further worked and reworked, the completed poem would ultimately emerge.

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

Light in August (1932) is one of William Faulkner's most important, most challenging, and most widely studied novels, demanding to be approached from many angles and with a variety of critical and scholarly skills. Here five distinguished critics offer just such a range of approaches, discussing the novel in terms of its composition and its place in Faulkner's oeuvre; its structure and narrative techniques; its relation to the religious, racial, and sexual assumptions of the society it depicts; its presentation of women and handling of gender-related issues; and the social and moral implications of the 'hero' status accorded to a figure like Joe Christmas. Each contributor has had a double ambition: to write clearly and directly, thus making the volume accessible to the widest possible audience, and to write freshly and originally, so as to enhance - even for those thoroughly familiar with the existing criticism - understanding and appreciation of Light in August itself and of Faulkner's work as a whole.

In a series of essays written especially for this volume, five distinguished critics offer a range of approaches, discussing the novel in terms of its composition and position in Faulkner's career, its structure and narrative techniques, and its relation to the religious, racial, and sexual assumptions of the society it represents.

One of the literary world's great deceptions was perpetrated when Thomas Hardy wrote his Life in secret for publication after his death as an official biography. Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography. But this is not the whole truth: Florence altered much of what Hardy meant to appear in his 'biography'. Through careful examination of pre- publication texts, Michael Millgate has retrieved the text as it stood at the time of Hardy's final revision. For the first time The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy can be read as a true work of autobiography - an addition to the Hardy canon.

This is the long-awaited supplementary volume to the authoritative seven-volume edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate and Richard Purdy, that was published by OUP between 1978 and 1988. Volume 8, edited by Millgate in collaboration with leading Hardy scholar Professor Keith Wilson, contains previously unpublished letters from all periods of Hardy's career, his earliest known letter among them. It introduces important new correspondents, throws fresh light on existing correspondences, and richly enhances the reader's understanding of both familiar and hitherto unfamiliar aspects of Hardy's life and work and of the times in which he lived.

A richly annotated and textually reliable edition of Hardy's numerous public utterances, from formal essays and speeches to anonymous contributions to literary gossip-columns. Many are newly identified as Hardy's, and he is revealed as having been much more actively involved with contemporary issues - literary, social, political, or merely local - than previously realized.

The testamentary acts of Michael Millgate's title are those strategies of self-protection and self-projection--textual and personal, before and after death--by which authors seek in old age to enhance posterity's view of themselves and their work. The four figures examined here in detail--Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, Henry James, and Thomas Hardy--sought to maintain their personal privacy and control the integrity of their texts by, for example, destroying documents, writing autobiographies, revising their earlier works and supplying them with retrospective prefaces, and publishing so-called "collected" editions that omitted items they no longer wished to preserve. These and other strategies have been widely practiced by writers, but can have entirely unanticipated results, as Millgate shows. His study also examines the difficult role of such literary executors as Pen Browning, Hallam Tennyson, and Florence Hardy, called upon to exercise a delegated, hence compromised, authority. The final section of the book considers the wills and wishes of many other literary figures, from Samuel Johnson to Walt Whitman to Philip Larkin, emphasizing the importance for contemporary biographers and editors of attention to these end-games--to the often disregarded final years of writers, and to both the intentions and the consequences of their explicit and implicit testamentary acts.

Thomas Hardy's Studies, Specimens &c. notebook stands almost alone as a witness to his exertions and aspirations of the 1860s, when he was already in his middle twenties but still working in London as an architectual assistant and only tentatively feeling his way towards as yet dimly glimpsed possibilities of literary expression and employment. Because so little documentation of any kind has survived for this early period of his life and work, the notebook is of extraordinary interest as containing detailed evidence of the untutored deliberateness with which Hardy was seeking to provide himself with a poetic background, educate himself in poetic techniques, and initiate a process from which he could perhaps emerge as a practising, even a publishing, poet. In private hands until very recently, and seen by only a very few scholars, Studies, Specimens &c.' dates from 1865-68, is entirely in Hardy's own hand, and consists of eighty-eight closely written pages of working memoranda, and quotations from other poets - mostly extracts a few words long in which underlining has been used to highlight individual images and word-usages. Although no drafts of actual poems are present, there are numerous instances of Hardy's seeking to generate a poetic, and sometimes erotic, language and imagery out of materials (e.g., an architectual textbook) apparently chosen precisley for their recalcitrance to such treatment. The edition itself seeks to reproduce typographically all essential features of the original document. The introductory material describes the notebook bibliographically, sets it in its biographical context, and discusses some of its more important technical features. Included in the extensive apparatus are textual notes, explications of Hardy's occasional quotations - indicating, in most instances, the editions or actual volumes he certainly or probably used. Explanatory notes are provided for - among other things - some erased but now partly recoved memoranda of Hardy's that appear to have significant biographical implications.

The opening section of this seventh and final volume of the definitive edition of Thomas Hardy's letters covers the period from January 1926 to December 1927: his last letter, to Edmund Gosse, was written on Christmas Day 1927 and he died seventeen days later, on 11 January 1928. Although few of his long-standing personal correspondences were actively kept up during these last two years of his life, Hardy maintained (especially when writing to Sir Frederick Macmillan) a lively and practical interest in all aspects of his work and career; he also responded, usually with a courteous refusal, to the many requests and enquiries that his fame inevitably attracted. The second section is devoted to letters which became available too late for publication in their correct chronological sequence in earlier volumes of the edition; those now added date mostly from the nineteenth century, and include a series of letters to officials of the Duchy of Cornwall about the purchase of land on which Max Gate was built, as well as numerous individual letters of considerable interest and importance. This volume contains more than 350 letters, the great majority of them previously unpublished, which are supplemented, as before, by scrupulous annotation and extensive cross-referencing; by a chronology covering the whole of Hardy's career; and by an index of recipients of the letters included. As the concluding volume, however, it also incorporates an extensive General Index covering the texts and annotations of the entire edition.

From reviews of previous volumes: "Has the qualities that a great edition should have: it is meticulously thorough and accurate, and its aids to the reader are clear and comprehensive."--Times Literary Supplement. "An indispensable work of scholarship."--Nineteenth-Century Fiction. The correspondents in this volume range widely--from Edmund Gosse and Walter de la Mare to Ezra Pound--and the letters show an aging Hardy still deeply involved in all aspects of his professional life The nearly 700 letters, most of which have never been published, are supplemented by scrupulous annotation and extensive cross-referencing, by a chronology covering Hardy's entire career, and by an index of correspondents included in this volume.

Winner of the Thomas Hardy Society Book Prize.

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.

Thomas Hardy's greatness as a novelist and poet is universally acknowledged. These letters provide invaluable glimpses into his life, from the years as an unknown architect's assistant in London in the 1860s to the final period of extensive productivity in the relative isolation of Max Gate. The more than three hundred letters included here have been drawn from the recently completed seven-volume Clarendon Press edition of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, which was edited by Michael Millgate in collaboration with Richard L. Purdy. Although all aspects of Hardy's career are reflected, the selection particularly emphasizes his personal rather than his purely professional relationships: ample representation is therefore given to his correspondence with his family, with his two wives, and with such close friends as Edmund Gosse and Florence Henniker. Many other notable figures are also addressed, among them Walter de la Mare, Millicent Fawcett, Harley Granville Barker, Ezra Pound, Marie Stopes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Virginia Woolf. The full and immediately accessible annotations to individual letters are supplemented by editorial commentaries designed to place particular letters or sequences of letters within the broader contexts of Hardy's life and literary career. The volume also includes a brief introduction, a chronology, and an index.

The mauve life and times of Edmund Gosse glow warmly in these letters, delightful to even the most casual reader, engrossing to one with an interest in the distinguished correspondents or in the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras. An obscure figure today to all but literary connoisseurs, Gosse was, in his day, a near giant in both England and the United States. Max Beerbohm, that discriminating man, in a mural of prominent figures who were also his friends, sketched Edmund Gosse large among George Bernard Shaw, John Masefield, G. K. Chesterton, John Galsworthy, and Lytton Strachey. This volume consists primarily of a selection of the letters exchanged between Gosse and a number of American writers, notably William Dean Howells, Edmund Clarence Stedman, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Richard Watson Gilder, Edith Wharton, and Henry James. The letters, most of them previously unpublished, contain much of biographical and general historical interest, but the main theme of the book is the exploration of Anglo-American literary relations during the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the early years of the twentieth. The letters that passed between Gosse and Stedman provide valuable evidence for the study of literary taste on the two sides of the Atlantic and also show how each man sought to enhance the other's transatlantic reputation; the correspondence between Gosse and Gilder, particularly during the period when Gosse was London editor of Gilder's Century magazine, is especially revealing of cultural attitudes and antagonisms. A central thread is provided by the warm and long-sustained friendship between Gosse and Howells, the leading American man of letters of his day. The long introduction to the book deals with such topics as Gosse's American reputation, his immensely successful visit to the United States in the winter of 1884-1885 (based on the manuscript diary that Gosse kept during the visit), and his American friendships, with particular attention to the relationship with Howells. The thoroughness and vitality of the annotation are extremely effective in familiarizing the reader with the people and events in the book.

Celebrating the centenary of William Faulkner's birthThis volume brings together for the first time eight masterful essays on William Faulkner by one of his most eloquent and influential critics. Michael Millgate established himself as a leading authority on Faulkner with the publication of The Achievement of William Faulkner more than thirty years ago. Since then, in pieces such as Faulkner and History and Faulkner's Masters, he has continued to reflect upon the legendary southern writer, his unique sense of physical place, and his place in literary history.Written with humor and insight, Faulkner's Place is lively, readable, and extremely accessible both to longtime Faulkner enthusiasts and to those who are new to his work. Taken together, the essays represent an impressive contribution to the understanding and appreciation of Faulkner's richly varied career.Backward and past-obsessed though it might seem and be, even Yoknapatawpha, even northern Mississipi, could not remain motionless and unchanging. This was something Faulkner came to understand very clearly in later years, when the concept of life as motion became central to his thought and his work, and that understanding was no doubt sharpened and confirmed, within his own creative experience, by the way in which Yoknapatawpha itself had so rapidly and so radically burst the bonds of its initial time- and map-bound conception. -- from 'A Cosmos of My Own': The Evolution of YoknapatawphaThese essays represent the thinking of one of the most important of Faulkner scholars. -- Hugh Ruppersburg