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The Phantom of Thomas Hardy
Floyd Skloot
University of Wisconsin Press, 2016
On a street in Dorchester, England, there is a gateway between real and imagined lives. A plaque identifies a Barclays Bank building as “lived in by the Mayor of Casterbridge in Thomas Hardy’s story of that name written in 1885.”
In this imaginative novel, worlds continue to collide as Floyd, an American writer recovering from a devastating neuro-viral attack, and his wife, Beverly, immerse themselves in Hardy’s world. While pondering the enigma of a fictional character living in a factual building, Floyd is approached by Hardy himself—despite his death in 1928.
            This phantom—possibly conjured out of Floyd’s damaged brain—tasks the Americans with finding out what Hardy missed in love. Embarking on their quest, they visit Hardy’s birthplace, home, and grave, exploring the Dorset landscape and the famous novels with their themes of tormented love. Peering into the Victorian past, they slowly dismantle the clutter of screens that Hardy placed around his private life, even as their own love story unfolds, filled with healing and hope.
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Thomas Hardy
Distance and Desire
J. Hillis Miller
Harvard University Press, 1970
In this provocative and original study of Hardy's poems and novels, Mr. Miller probes a number of the interrelated motifs that dominate Hardy's work, examining his detachment from the world around him and his subsequent commitment to a fictional reality related obliquely to that world. This double impulse of detachment and involvement constitutes for Mr. Miller the key to Hardy's art—the simultaneous "distance" and "desire" of the book's subtitle. Mr. Miller also relates Hardy's work to nineteenth- and twentieth-century thought and to the form of Victorian fiction. In unfolding his views about Hardy's craft through a distilling of common characteristics in the poems and novels, he sharpens the reader's sense of Hardy the man, presenting him as a convincing psychological entity.
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Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel
Mary Chase
University of Minnesota Press, 1927
Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel was first published in 1927. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.This volume is a valuable examination of Thomas Hardy’s revisions in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure that rendered them acceptable to the taste of the 1880s magazine reader. A fascinating study of authorship, a compelling study of Hardy’s major works, a historical study of literary construction: no one seriously interested in the art of the novel or in its relation to social history can neglect Professor Chase’s study. It is an indispensable Hardy “item” for libraries, collectors, and all students of literature.
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Thomas Hardy
Half a Londoner
Mark Ford
Harvard University Press, 2016

Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer.

Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy’s London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fête the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy’s poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author’s complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances.

The young Hardy’s oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset’s Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

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