Paradox ruled Thomas Hardy's life. His birth was almost his death; he became one of the great Victorian novelists and reinvented himself as one of the twentieth-century's greatest poets; he was an unhappy husband but a desolate widower; he wrote bitter attacks on the English class system yet prized the friendship of aristocrats. In the hands of Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy the novelist, poet, neglectful husband and mourning lover all come intensely alive.