Achievement of Thomas Hardy

''Now there is a clarity. There is the harvest of having written 20 novels first''. - Ezra Pound. The essays collected here range widely over Hardy''s career as both a novelist and a lyric poet. They offer fresh reading of individual works - including his last novel, The Well-Beloved , and his first collection of verse, Wessex Poems - as well as exploring such central topics as the nature of story...