Thomas Hardy

Ralph Pite

Jude the Obscure

Hester Jones

Elizabeth A. Kaye specializes in communications as part of her coaching and consulting practice. She has edited Requirements for Certification since the 2000-01 edition.

Speaking Towards You

W.S. Graham

The Guarded Life challenges some of the long-held views of Hardy - did he spend all his early life in preparation for his career as a writer, and did his novels really come a distant second to his poetry in his heart? In his personal life, did his first wife, Emma Hardy, really trick him into marriage and was she the ambitious women her enemies have painted her as being? And what of Florence, his second wife, who has so often been caricatured in her conflicted and passionate feelings for Hardy? By examining the relationships and contexts that shaped Hardy most - the women, the friendships and mentors, the social and family pressures, the career structures and the Dorsetshire landscape - The Guarded Life reveals the personality and emotional life of a public figure who has despite his fame remained until now largely obscure.

The Guarded Life

The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. But the impact of Dante on English writers has rarely been analysed and its history has been little understood. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote or painted while Dante's work - its style, project, and achievement commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of their engagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own work. It explores how Romantic poets understood Dante, what they valued in his poetry and why, and sets them in the context of contemporary commentators, translators, and illustrators (including Henry Fuseli and John Flaxman), both in England and Europe. Romantic readings of the Divine Comedy are shown to disturb our own ideas about Dante, which are based on Victorian and Modernist assumptions. An important contribution to Romantic and Dante scholarship, The Circle of Our Vision also presents a reconsideration of the concept of 'influence' in general, using the example of Dante's presence in Romantic poetry to challenge Harold Bloom's belief that the relations between poets are invariably a fight to the death.

Dante's Presence in English Romantic Poetry

The Circle of Our Vision

Fellow and Director of Studies in English Ralph Pite

The sudden and spectacular growth in Dante's popularity in England at the end of the eighteenth century was immensely influential for English writers of the period. Byron, Shelley, Keats, Coleridge, Blake, and Wordsworth all wrote and painted while Dante's work commanded their attention and provoked their disagreement. In the first detailed study of the subject, The Circle of Our Vision discusses each of these writers in detail, assessing the nature of theirengagement with the Divine Comedy and the consequences for their own writing, and setting them in the context of commentators, translators, and illustrators both in England and Europe.

A portrait of the enigmatic nineteenth-century novelist and poet discusses his humble origins, rise through the London literary scene, and efforts to guard his privacy.

Ralph Pite

About

Books

Join the club