A stubborn mystery ...

... ASHGATE RESEARCH COMPANION TO THOMAS HARDY, reviewed by Seamus Perry - TLS.

Hardy might encourage us to think it an “irony” that he was himself not a companionable person. It is no reflection on the learning and expertise represented in these pages that you feel at times as though the subject of the book has slipped out the back while you were otherwise occupied with some fascinating piece of context. Probably any author worth writing about will finally elude the criticism that gets written about him, but if so, then Hardy seems the extreme case of a general law, somehow intrinsically tricky to capture ...