All biographies of Thomas Hardy are forced to acknowledge a major obstacle: he was exceptionally secretive and reticent. He burned letters; he rarely spoke publicly; he denied connections between his work and his life; he crafted an autobiography, eventually published under the name of his second wife, which tightly guarded all the privacies of romance and feeling. For Ralph Pite, this secrecy is the hurdle that both complicates his own task and seems to validate it. “What he reveals of himself,” Pite says of Hardy's personal writings, is “strictly on his terms. … What persists is a feeling of tantalizing nearness” (6). Pite's point is clear and—from earlier Hardy biographies—familiar: the biographer is going to explain the things that the author never wanted explained.

Pite unfortunately takes this caginess as license for a consistently hazy kind of psychological speculation. His biography's dominant tic or tendency is an insistence on understanding the novels as Hardy's way of dealing with his own private dramas merely. Masterpieces like The Mayor of Casterbridge become a sort of residue or runoff of the author's struggles with his own passivity, repression, or sorrow. The young Hardy, then, “used the pursuit of knowledge as a way of suppressing feeling” (114). His epic poem The Dynasts was “a place of retreat from his miserable domestic life” (386). His autobiography became “a form of therapy” (434). “Training himself in poetry,” meanwhile, was designed by Hardy to keep “desperation at bay” (126).

None of these statements is purely false on its own. But the accumulation of such claims leads to a vague psychological portrait of the man and the writer. Pite can be particularly imprecise when talking about the formation of Hardy's intellect and imagination. “What captured his interest were books that expressed and so reawakened the feelings of betrayal, beleaguered insecurity, and disillusionment he was struggling to keep under control,” he writes, without telling us what those books were (114). In 1887, we are told, Hardy “began to feel that he both could and should trust his idiosyncrasies more” (294). But what were those idiosyncrasies? How did they actually take shape in the novels and poems? Pite pays scant attention to the works themselves, even if his interest apparently lies in the way those works articulated the private and secret psychological dramas that shaped Hardy in life. He makes a good point, for instance, that the early 1880s were a major turning point for Hardy's fiction—but he doesn’t explain why these years were finally so transformative. It is not enough to say that this period marked “an attempt to overcome the primness and cowardice of the publishing world and to make novels more honest” (305).

Pite's book joins a crowded field of recent Hardy biographies. Michael Millgate's 1982 Thomas Hardy: A Biography—still the best—was revised and expanded in 2004; Claire Tomalin's Thomas Hardy was published in 2007. (Robert Gittings's two-part life of Hardy, from the 1970s, is also an authoritative version.) To clear space for itself on the shelf, a new entry needs to make use of newly available materials, as Millgate's 2004 revision did (including discussion of letters and records from early and late in Hardy's life), or else it should adopt a new perspective on a life that has already received extensive biographical study since Hardy's death in 1928. Tomalin, to her credit, does that: her version emphasizes the poetry, long neglected by scholars and readers more interested in the novels. Hardy gave up fiction in 1896, after Jude the Obscure, and wrote verse for more than thirty years. Tomalin devotes about one-third of her biography to these later years and refocuses our attention on the extraordinary collections of verse from Wessex Poems to Winter Words.

Tomalin's attention to the poetry, however, comes at the expense of certain other sides of Hardy the writer and thinker: she especially undervalues his role in the innovations and disputes within English fiction and criticism in the late nineteenth century. In this respect, her biography suffers from much the same flaw as Pite’s. Pite too seems little interested in Hardy the thinker or prophet: the novels are presented more as the result of something in his life (general passivity, marital unhappiness) than as the articulation of something that needs to be reckoned with on its own terms or as part of a larger category of literature. The life fails to illuminate the writings in any significant way, and the writings mostly decline to illuminate a life that insists on remaining always just out of focus.

What is missing, then, is the kind of synthesis that can connect the unhappily married man living in Dorset to the novelist ensnared in the disputes over “realism” in the 1890s and to the poet who published several astonishing collections of verse in the first two decades of the twentieth century (verse that would have such a major influence on a sequence of English writers from Lawrence to Larkin). Indeed, Hardy the poet seems notably obscured here. Pite makes good use of the writer's journals and notebooks, and midway through the biography he delves profitably into Hardy's first wife Emma's own journals. At these moments Pite offers the kind of close textual analysis that he declines to devote to the novels or poems themselves. In the end, alas, this biography only confirms the caveat of its subtitle. Hardy's life remains guarded, his many volumes of prose and verse a fortress surrounding it.