Thomas Hardy Remembered assembles some 150 annotated interviews and recollections of Hardy, most of which are being reprinted for the first time. They range from close personal reflections by old friends such as Sir George Douglas, J. M. Barrie, and Edmund Gosse, to fleeting glimpses by strangers. Martin Ray has selected items with the greatest literary or biographical significance, and annotated them meticulously and with a keen eye for the telling detail. The volume will be an invaluable resource to scholars interested not only in what concerned Hardy personally and professionally, but in how he was perceived by others. Certain topics recur with marked regularity that clearly affected Hardy the man and the writer. With regard to the latter, a portrait emerges of Hardy as the scrupulous professional, properly aware of his commercial rights, while at the same time appearing, to some who met him, unconscious of his own genius.
