Beskrivelse
Thomas Hardy : a mean, snobbish, impotent pessimist who had little understanding of women, and who suffered from a feeble intellect. Or so the popular myth encouraged by previous biographers, particularly Robert Gittings, and Michael Millgate would have us believe. But Martin Seymour-Smith claims that this picture of Hardy is plain wrong, that the writer has been disastrously misinterpreted. Hardy, he maintains, was a sensitive, intelligent, profoundly ironic man who cared deeply about his fellow beings – including his two wives and the other women he loved.