Barbara Nathan Hardy

"Dylan Thomas's life and work have made him a legendary figure since he died, amid alcohol and debts, in New York at the age of thirty-nine. At the heart of his achievement are a few dozen poems and stories which, together with the romantic comedy Under Milk Wood, haunt the imagination and give his writing a broader appeal than he could have envisaged. Beyond his writing is the chequered figure of the poet himself: often comic, at times in despair, always self-obsessed, in the end defeated by his own nature." "Paul Ferris's classic biography has been recognised as the standard life since it first appeared in 1977. He has now drawn on fresh material to revise the book. In particular, he looks again at Thomas's marriage to the fiery Caitlin, and finds in it the seeds of a fatal dependence."--BOOK JACKET.

A collection of poems inspired by London's rivers.

Charles Dickens's experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. His intelligence works intuitively rather than conceptually and ideas about imagination often emerge informally in personal letters and implicitly through characters, language and story. His self-analysis and reflexive tendency are embedded in his styles and forms of narrative and dialogue, images of normality, madness, extremity, subversion and disorder, poetry and inter-textuality, anticipating and shaping the languages of modernism, influencing James Joyce and Virginia Woolf as well as traditionalists like H.G. Wells and Evelyn Waugh.  Discussing Dickens's novels and some of his letters, sketches, essays and stories, Barbara Hardy offers a fascinating demonstration of creativity.

"Swansea Girl is a recollection of childhood and adolescence told with an attractive candour and made vivid by the author's remarkable eye for detail. It concentrates on the period 1924-42."--BOOK JACKET. "Barbara Hardy's maternal grandfather came from a Devon family, some of whom took part in the emigration across the Bristol Channel to the late-Victorian industries of South Wales. This family married into a Welsh tribe of Joneses. Her father's family was of Eastern European Jewish ancestry. The author groups her memories into themes, forming a broadly sequential pattern - mother and father, brother and cousins, schools, culture, politics, religion, sex and love. And she shows us how the lives of her parents were shaped by history, in particular by the two world wars, the Wall Street crash of 1929 and the thirties Depression."--BOOK JACKET. "Barbara and her brother Bill grew up in the provincial culture of their time, in a Baptist religion, a narrow moral code and with the mixed blessings of an elementary and grammar-school education. Yet the emphasis of this appealing story is on family life, with its rich throng of relations, friends and languages, and their compelling influences."--BOOK JACKET.

The illicit romance of a Welsh woman and an American. She is Florence, a sexually adventurous scholar of Victorian fiction. He is Mick, an Oxford professor whose wife has multiple sclerosis. Perfect arrangement, or unbearable situation? Florence can't decide.

Not for publication: 'promises to present the distilled understanding and insight of Professor Hardy's lifetime engagement with George Eliot...strengths lie in the sensitive close reading that distinguishes Barbara Hardy's criticism and in the fascinating links and echoes between life and fiction that her comprehensive knowledge of the novelist's writing enables her to find...the proposed book would be accessible to a wide general readership and Barbara Hardy's established reputation would be a selling point in itself.' Readers report from John Rignall (Reader at University of Warwick and editor of The Oxford Reader's Companion to George Eliot) 'a genuinely interesting contribution to George Eliot scholarship by one of the leading postwar critics of Victorian fiction. The conception is bold and arresting... it reads excellently but its clarity is also vivid, effective and engaging. It wears its evident deep learning, and informed familiarity with Eliot's world, lightlyàIt manages to integrate three achievements: to give an animated sense of Eliot's personality as a woman, an intellectual, and a writer; it evokes successfully the milieu in which she lived and worked; and it offers genuine illumination in relation to the fiction.' Professor Rick Rylance, Deputy Head of English Department, University of Exeter (and former Chair of Council for College and University English) Review of Thomas Hardy by NATFHE: 'The community of critics and readers interested in Victorian studies can always expect Barbara Hardy to come up with an interesting perspective on texts we all thought had been read thoroughly into familiarityàThe beauty of this book is also that a whole range of people could read it, from A level students to Hardy specialists.'