'A raging, wounded inner self'

Thomas Hardy
By Claire Tomalin
Penguin, 486 pp., illustrated, $35

Claire Tomalin is a widely admired, versatile literary biographer. She has written lives of the diarist Samuel Pepys, novelist Jane Austen, and short-story writer Katherine Mansfield. Drawn to people with hidden stories and those who transgress cultural boundaries, Tomalin has written about Mary Wollstonecraft, Shelley, and King William IV's mistress Dora Jordan.

Now, in her eighth biography, Tomalin takes on Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), author of such classic novels as "The Return of the Native" and "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." At once the last Victorian and first modernist, canonized as both novelist and poet, Hardy is an important, beloved writer. Old-fashioned in technique, his work has a contemporary vision, free of false solace, doomstruck.

Three Hardy biographies have appeared in the last dozen years : by Martin Seymour-Smith in 1994, Michael Millgate in 2004, and Ralph Pite in 2006 . That Tomalin chose to write another suggests how rich a subject Hardy remains , and also how elusive. "He was by nature unsociable, preferring his private world to any companionship." Even as a child, Hardy liked to lose himself in reading, music, and solitude. His life contained few apparent diversions beyond writing.

Yet there is something about the way Hardy's dark work contradicts his seemingly placid life that continues to intrigue scholars and readers. Tomalin says, "The books are powerful, bleak and sometimes savage in their representation of human experience ." She speaks of "a closed and barred door" between the "quietly spoken person" and "the raging, wounded inner self who chastised the values of the world he inhabited."

Hardy may be tough to get at, but Tomalin creates a believable, intimate, readable portrait of the man. Born in his parents' Dorset home, he was immediately given up for dead. The midwife set him aside and tended to the mother until a family nurse noticed signs of life. This first moment is a quintessentially Hardy moment, full of pathos, bitter dismissal, dire implication. Tomalin gives full dimension to Hardy's isolated childhood by the heath he made famous, to his family of laborers and home builders who loved playing music, to his sense of difference from those around him, his passion for books.

Hardy became an architect and went to London for work, but yearned for a life connected to literature. Tomalin, whose gift for storytelling is rare among biographers, includes a memorable scene in which Hardy, as a 26-year-old architect, supervised the relocation of graves from a church cemetery . The work proved comically macabre as coffins fell apart and a "collapsed coffin gave up one skeleton and two skulls."

Hardy's first ventures into writing were discouraging. No one wanted to print his poems or first novel. He wrote a little about architecture and won a prize, but that was not the sort of writing Hardy meant to do. Examining his first novel, Tomalin addresses the question of "how did the young architectural assistant turn into the socialistic novelist and satirist?" For her, it was about "breaking the ties that might have kept him" in working contact with his builder family, and about "demonstrating his ambition to become a different sort of person."

Hardy's second effort at novel-writing, "Desperate Remedies," found publication in 1871, though he had to underwrite its costs. The next year, "Under the Greenwood Tree " succeeded well enough to interest a magazine editor in presenting "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873) as a serial before book publication. Then came the enormously popular "Far From the Madding Crowd," in 1874, and his career was launched.

Tomalin covers Hardy's literary life, presenting each book and the circumstances of its composition and reception . But details of literary production, travels, and social interactions are in many ways secondary . It is Hardy's long, painful marriage to the eccentric and increasingly discontented Emma that occupies the heart of Tomalin's biography.

While this topic, too, yields no new facts, Tomalin intends to see it more fully than previous biographers, centering her account of Hardy's life on it. This is why she begins the book with Emma Hardy's death and its astonishing impact on Hardy and his poetry . After more than 40 years together, after their once-fruitful companionship had turned to distaste and embarrassment, Emma's death triggered a flowering of mournful love poetry. "This is the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet." One further contradiction in a life overstuffed with them: The disconnected, dissatisfied husband transformed into a lovelorn soul by the loss of one he no longer loved. Full of empathy and clear thought, Tomalin has written a compelling, riveting story as well as a thoroughly researched biography.

Floyd Skloot received the 2004 PEN Center USA Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction for his memoir, "In the Shadow of Memory." His novel "Patient 002" is due out in April.