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COPYRIGHT 2007 ELT Press
Keith Wilson, ed. Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in Honour of Michael Millgate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006. xxiii + 304 pp. $65.00 40.00 [pounds sterling]
IN HIS INTRODUCTION to Thomas Hardy Reappraised, Keith Wilson points out that before Michael Millgate's publication of Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist in 1971, biographical information about Hardy was greatly limited, his novels and poems existed in inferior editions, few of his letters had appeared in print, only one of Hardy's notebooks had been adequately edited and, because of all this, critics were hampered by a lack of solid information about Hardy. Today that situation has greatly changed--in very large measure as a result of the profoundly original scholarly achievement of Michael Millgate. This festschrift by fifteen well-known scholars is an expression of gratitude for that extraordinary accomplishment, and what is appropriately striking about such a collection of studies is how remarkably original and how soundly scholarly they are.
The collection opens with Pamela Dalziel's "The Gospel According to Hardy" in which she reprints a newly discovered, strikingly evangelical sermon, written and signed by Hardy when he was eighteen years old. Dalziel persuasively argues that, when considered along with other evidence, the sermon suggests that Hardy's account of his early religious experiences in Life and Work minimizes what probably were more strongly felt early evangelical views. In a tribute to the dean of Hardy's biographers, it is an appropriately original biographical revelation. The following study, "'My Scripture Manner': Reading Hardy's Biblical and Liturgical Allusion" by Mary Rimmer, carefully surveys the "shiftiness"...
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