Between the Pages is a new, weekly blog series which explores the life, times and creative works of well-known authors. I plan to run the blog series until the end of 2015, focusing on one author per month. New posts every Tuesday, plus occasional bonus posts.
The first post in the series is a brief biography of the author, the second looks at the historical period of the author, and the third post discusses their creative works. Finally, the last post includes selected quotations and short excerpts by the author.
As we’ve established, Thomas Hardy was not exactly the cheeriest of fellows. When I searched on Goodreads for quotes to include in this post, this was in the top five: “Happiness was but the occasional episode in a general drama of pain”.
Hardy’s writing can be grim but as one of my readers commented on the last post, he wrote about situations from his own observation — it’s not simply gratuitous tragedy.