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Woman Much Missed is the first book-length study of the many poems that Thomas Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma. It shows how Emma's writings and experiences were fundamental to Hardy's evolution into both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century
List of contents
- Note on Texts
- Abbreviations
- Preface
- Prologue: She Opened the Door
- What Poetry Meant to Hardy
- 1: Votary of the Muse
- 2: The Other Side of Common Emotions
- Lyonnesse
- 3: Emma's Devon and Cornwall
- 4: Courtship
- The Rift
- 5: A Preface Without Any Book
- 6: Divisions Dire and Wry
- Afterwards
- 7: Dear Ghost
- 8: Two Bright-Souled Women
- Selected Bibliography
- Acknowledgements
About the author
Mark Ford teaches in the English Department of University College London, where he has been a professor since 2005. He is a poet, critic, and editor, as well as a regular contributor to literary journals such as the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also completed two series of an LRB podcast on 20th-century poets with Seamus Perry. This is his second book on the work of Thomas Hardy. His collection of essays, This Dialogue of One, was the winner of the Poetry Foundation's 2015 Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism.
Summary
Woman Much Missed is the first book-length study of the many poems that Thomas Hardy composed in the wake of the death of his first wife Emma. It shows how Emma's writings and experiences were fundamental to Hardy's evolution into both a best-selling novelist and into one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century
Additional text
Paying homage to Hardy, Robert Frost seized on a vital quality: 'He has planted himself on the wrongs that can't be righted.' Emma's death is one such wrong, and in Woman Much Missed Mark Ford weaves together the life and poetry without reducing one to the other and offers a fine-grained analysis of their relationship and its bearing on Hardy's work. Moving from his depictions of Emma's life before they met to their courtship and marriage, to her death and its aftermath, Ford's is the first book-length study of what he calls 'the entire corpus of Emma poems'.
