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Outstanding
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Publishers Weekly
Tomalin's biography artfully presents Hardy in his intimate and social world, offering succinct and insightful readings of his work along the way. [4 Dec 2006, p.47]
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Outstanding
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Booklist Bryce Christensen
Longtime friends who regarded Thomas Hardy as a "sphinx-like" riddle would marvel at how fully a twenty-first-century biographer illuminates the Victorian writer's tangled life. [15 Nov 2006, p.17]
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Outstanding
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Kirkus Reviews
Tomalin thoughtfully considers these works, and the poignant marriage of Hardy to Em, in a text brimming with insight. [1 Nov 2006, p.1119]
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Outstanding
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The Spectator Raymond Carr
This book gives a splendid picture of Hardy in his declining years when Max Gate had become a place of pilgrimage to the Grand Old Man of English letters. [21 Oct 2006]
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Outstanding
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Boston Globe Floyd Skloot
Full of empathy and clear thought, Tomalin has written a compelling, riveting story as well as a thoroughly researched biography.
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Outstanding
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Chicago Tribune Julia Keller
This is the triumph of the biographer's art, of which Tomalin is a master: to be absolutely true to the last scrap of fact--that is, never to embellish or contort those facts--yet to create something utterly new and undreamt of, something more than the mere sum of those facts.
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Outstanding
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The New York Times Book Review Thomas Mallon
Tomalin herself examines the novels with the confident judgments of a critic, not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar.
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Outstanding
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The Economist
This biography, from one of the most accomplished practitioners of the art, is a work of supreme sensitivity and control. Managing her materials with deceptive ease and fluency, Ms Tomalin provides an object lesson in how to write a life.
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Outstanding
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The Guardian Richard Holmes
The outstanding quality of the biography is the easy, confident flow of Tomalin's narrative style. I know no other biographer currently writing quite like this. She is deeply at home in the period, generous, meticulous, affectionate, full of common sense, occasionally tart, but always thoughtful. Continuously one thinks: yes, this is how life - how a writer's life - is. That is a rare achievement.
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Outstanding
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The Observer Hilary Spurling
Their story is told with great and revealing delicacy, generosity, even tenderness in this haunting and haunted biography.
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Outstanding
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The Independent Sue Gaisford
What makes Tomalin supreme is her remarkable ability fully to enter into the life she describes. She knows her subject as well, if not better, than did his many friends and both his wives. She understands him, and she is amused, moved, delighted, occasionally bored and sometimes exasperated by him.
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Favorable
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The Independent Dinah Birch
Claire Tomalin's friendly account of Hardy's life can claim no bold revelations, but its sympathetic touch clarifies the dislocations that lay behind his success. She is particularly sensitive to his complex feelings towards women.
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Favorable
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The New Yorker Adam Kirsch
Much of Tomalin’s book is devoted to sorting out the rights and wrongs of the Hardy marriage, and no one has done it more judiciously or convincingly.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Jonathan Yardley
It is one of the many strengths of Claire Tomalin's biography that she conveys in full Hardy's simple humanity...Her prose is fluid, and she can see her subject's strengths and weaknesses clearly but sympathetically.
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Favorable
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Los Angeles Times Nicholas Delbanco
Although never quite dismissive, Tomalin can grow irritable with her subject; one has the sense that she felt more kinship with Austen and, more recently, Pepys. There's such deep-veined disappointment embedded in Hardy, so much withheld or chary that one feels his biographer's fond patience wane.
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Favorable
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Library Journal T.L. Cooksey
Tomalin's treatment throughout is well informed but popular in focus; she has no political or theoretical ax to grind. [15 Nov 2006, p.72]
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Favorable
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The New Republic William Deresiewicz
Tomalin's style is simple, terse, and at times even grand, with flashes of humor and mordant wit. Her biography is poetry to Millgate's prose, but if Hardy's own poetry, as Pound said, was made possible by his prose, Tomalin's was made possible by Millgate's.
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Mixed
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement Jonathan Bate
Her book has great charm and is effortlessly readable. Its most valuable contribution is to open up the poems for the benefit of the many readers who know only the novels. It does, however, lack the intellectual meat required by those with an appetite for a full understanding of Hardy’s achievement.
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Unfavorable
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Daily Telegraph Philip Hensher
For the first time when reading a biography by Claire Tomalin, I thought that there were better biographies of its subject, and that the subject just deserved, somehow, more.
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