Woman Much Missed :Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry
Woman Much Missed :Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy, and Poetry
hardback
Published:
13 July, 2023
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Description
Prizes
Winner of TLS Books of the Year 2023, selected by Andrew Motion New Statesmen Books of the Year 2023, selected by William Boyd.
More Details
| Type | Book |
|---|---|
| ISBN13 | 9780192886804 |
| ISBN10 | 0192886800 |
| Number Of Pages | 266 |
| Item Weight | 472 g |
| Product Dimensions | 142 x 220 x 20 mm |
| Publisher / Reseller | Oxford University Press |
| Format | hardback |
Media Reviews
Ford's close reading of Hardy's poetry and his analysis of many of his influences and sources is impressive. There's a wealth of fascinating material in this book. * Harriet, Shiny New Books *
[O]utstanding: admirably concise but rich in the meticulous close reading at which Ford excels...Mark Ford sets it all out - the necromantic poet, his much-missed wife, and her "shy, pliant, star-struck" but no less ghost-ridden understudy - without ever passing judgement, except on the poetry. Compassionate, intelligent and supremely tactful, this is the deeply humane book all three deserve. * TLS *
The clarity and vigor of Ford's prose, supplemented with a judicious and selective amount of criticism, ensure that the book will be accessible to a broad readership. Ford's volume makes a major contribution to the study of Hardy's poetry...Highly recommended. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. * Choice *
Ford's work is humane in its recognition that a history of love, estrangement, remorse, and too-long postponed efforts at reconciliation, hurt Hardy into poetry. It is intelligent (and, indeed, equally humane) in its alertness to writing's exploratory impulse and transforming process. * Ralph Pite, The Review of English Studies *
Paying homage to Hardy, Robert Frost seized on a vital quality: 'He has planted himself on the wrongs that can't be righted.' Emma's death is one such wrong, and in Woman Much Missed Mark Ford weaves together the life and poetry without reducing one to the other and offers a fine-grained analysis of their relationship and its bearing on Hardy's work. Moving from his depictions of Emma's life before they met to their courtship and marriage, to her death and its aftermath, Ford's is the first book-length study of what he calls 'the entire corpus of Emma poems'. * Matthew Bevis, London Review of Books *
GoodReads Reviews
Author's Bio
Mark Ford teaches in the English Department of University College London, where he has been a professor since 2005. He is a poet, critic, and editor, as well as a regular contributor to literary journals such as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also completed two series of an LRB podcast on 20th-century poets with Seamus Perry. This is his second book on the work of Thomas Hardy. His collection of essays, This Dialogue of One, was the winner of the Poetry Foundation's 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.