Woman much missed : Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and poetry / Mark Ford.

9780191981708

Oxford : Oxford University Press, 2023.

1 online resource : illustrations (black and white, and colour).

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'Woman Much Missed' is a book-length study of the many poems (over 150) that Thomas Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma in November of 1912. Mark Ford uses these poems to develop a narrative of their four-year courtship on the remote and romantic coast of Cornwall where they met, and then follows Thomas's poetic recreation of the slow degeneration of their marriage and their embittered final decade. Ford shows how Emma's writings and experiences during this time were fundamental to Thomas's evolution into both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century. Although for over a decade the marriage between Thomas and Emma had been troubled, and indeed Emma spent much time during her final years secluded in her attic rooms above his study, her death stimulated him to write some of the greatest elegies in English.

Oxford scholarship online.

Print version :

Books / Online

English

September 14, 2023

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Specialized.