CLAIRE TOMALIN'S life of Thomas Hardy does not begin, as one would expect, with its subject's birth and antecedents, but with the death of his first wife Emma in 1912. This play with the narrative conventions of biography turns out to be a masterstroke, drawing the reader into Hardy's emotional universe, and giving human shape to the literary critical argument that it is as a poet, rather than a novelist, that the author of “Tess of the D'Urbervilles” achieved his finest work.

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