Pinion's Hardy Biography

ELT 36:4 1993 of aesthetic "greenery-yallery" young men flaunting lilies, sunflowers and green carnations. Stanley Weintraub The Pennsylvania State University Pinion's Hardy Biography Frank B. Pinion. Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992. χ + 438 pp. $35.00 THIS BOOK, some two decades in the making, began with the transcribing of extensive notes on Hardy manuscripts and related materials. An extraordinary flurry of editing and publication of various books prevented the writing of a full-scale biography of Hardy. Pinion, formerly a Reader in English Studies and a Sub-Dean in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sheffield, seems to have been straining at the leash during the lengthy term of his academic assignments, because so many of his books have come out since his retirement (or what some administrators at Sheffield might have argued was the end of formal duties in higher education). Surely the sunset years of an academic have seldom been so productive, or as useful to others in the field of literature. Pinion's interests are wide-ranging. He is famous for his Companions, those vade mecum handbooks so packed with information (much of it not easy to come by) aimed at readers interested in Jane Austen, the Brontes, George Eliot, Wordsworth, Tennyson, and T. S. Eliot. These are substantial volumes, authoritative, based on first-hand inspection of sites mentioned in the writings, reviews of manuscript holdings, and a judicious screening of scholarship and criticism. Macmillan, which published them, has every reason to be proud of Pinion's contributions to the Companion series. Even so, his service to the cottage industry of Hardy studies has undoubtedly been even greater. In addition to his founding and editing of the Review—between 1975 and 1984—published under the auspices of the Thomas Hardy Society (England), and his co-editing, with Evelyn Hardy, of the correspondence sent by Hardy to Florence Henniker between 1893 and 1922 (One Rare Fair Woman), Pinion has edited for the New Wessex Edition of Hardy's works Two on a Tower and the short stories (in three volumes); for the Hardy Society two anthologies, Thomas Hardy and the Modern World and Budmouth Essays on Thomas Hardy; and, for those readers who want to learn more about Hardy's art, A Hardy Companion (which competes with, but does not replace, 482 BOOK REVIEWS J. O. Bailey's The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary ), a Hardy Dictionary of hundreds of words and phrases that might puzzle readers (complete with maps and a chronology), A Commentary on the Poems of Thomas Hardy, Hardy the Writer: Surveys and Assessments , Thomas Hardy: Art and Thought, and Hardy the Writer. Not one of these is a lightweight production; not one of them repeats the wording or the insights of any other; the scholarship is impeccable and (I am pleased to be able to say) so is the proofreading. To this formidable bibliography Pinion has now added a biography. I will have more to say about the other biographies of the Man of Wessex that, over the years, have become a small library; but for the moment the best way to distinguish between the two most formidable recent biographies—those of Robert Gittings and Michael Millgate—and Pinion 's is to note (as Pinion does in his preface) that there is room for a biography "with emphasis on Hardy's friendships." In other respects, too, this work is different. Publication of the collected letters in seven volumes may not have done much to illuminate a number of important questions about events (and friendships) during the first half of Hardy's life, since Richard L. Purdy and Michael Millgate, co-editors of the correspondence, could trace only enough material to fill half of the first volume; much was not deemed important enough to save, and those letters dealing with courtship were destroyed, many years later, by Emma. Any fresh information about those first thirty-four years is welcome, and Pinion supplies as much new data as we can reasonably expect at this late date. Pinion is also a legatee of several trail-blazing investigations of primary materials published during...