Thomas Hardy's greatness as a novelist and poet is universally acknowledged. These letters provide invaluable glimpses into his life, from the years as an unknown architect's assistant in London in the 1860s to the final period of extensive productivity in the relative isolation of Max Gate.

The more than three hundred letters included here have been drawn from the recently completed seven-volume Clarendon Press edition of the Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, which was edited by Michael Millgate in collaboration with Richard L. Purdy. Although all aspects of Hardy's career are reflected, the selection particularly emphasizes his personal rather than his purely professional relationships: ample representation is therefore given to his correspondence with his family, with his two wives, and with such close friends as Edmund Gosse and Florence Henniker. Many other notable figures are also addressed, among them Walter de la Mare, Millicent Fawcett, Harley Granville Barker, Ezra Pound, Marie Stopes, Robert Louis Stevenson, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Virginia Woolf. The full and immediately accessible annotations to individual letters are supplemented by editorial commentaries designed to place particular letters or sequences of letters within the broader contexts of Hardy's life and literary career. The volume also includes a brief introduction, a chronology, and an index.