List Of Writers

HARDY, BARBARA (neé Nathan)

Penplas, Cwm Ivy Lane, Llanmadoc, Swansea, SA3 1DJ
Tel: (01792) 386347
Also 88, Philbeach Gardens, London, SW5 9EU
Tel: (020) 7370 2601

Critic, novelist, autobiographer and poet. Barbara was born in Swansea and educated at Swansea and University College London. Professor Emeritus, University of London. Hon. She is a Professor Emeritus at the University of London, and Hon. Professor of English at University of Swansea. Barbara is a Fellow of the University of Swansea, at Royal Holloway and Birkbeck Colleges, University of London, and also of the Royal Society of Literature and the British Academy. Her book London Lovers (Peter Owen, 1996) won the Sagittarius Prize. Barbara is one of the leading postwar experts on George Eliot, and also specializes in the work of, amongst others, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, Dickens and Shakespeare. Her literary criticism has published extensively, and she is also a well-regarded poet.

Reviews:

With respect to London Lovers (Peter Owen, 1996)

"… The novel’s structure is responsible for much of its easy, intimate charm. In thematic and topical chapters…Florence mingles memories of each lover into an elegiac, but not depressing portrait of her life…Hardy’s light touch and her effortless rendering of characters who naturally weave literature into their romances make her novel a bright, intelligent read..."
Publishers Weekly

With respect to George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (Writers Lives Series) (Continuum, 2006)

"…Hardy’s insights will be especially useful for readers very familiar with most if not all of Eliot’s fiction, as the critic goes from book to book in her pursuits of the connection between biography and the creation of the works. Recommended primarily for upper-division and graduate-level academic collections as well as for very large public libraries…”
Library Journal

Selected Publications:

Literary Criticism
The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (Athlone Press, 1959)
The Appropriate Form: An Essay on the Novel (Athlone Press, 1964)
Charlotte Bronte’s ’Jane Eyre’ (Notes on English Literature) (Blackwell, 1964)
Shakespeare’s ’Twelfth Night’ (Notes on English Literature) (Blackwell, 1965)
’Middlemarch’: Critical Approaches to the Novel (Athlone Press, 1967) 
Charles Dickens: The Later Novels: Bleak House…Edwin Drood (Writers and their work, no.205) (Longmans, 1968)
Moral Art of Dickens (Athlone Press, 1970)
Critical Essays on George Eliot (Routledge, 1970)
The Exposure of Luxury: Radical Themes in Thackery (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1972)
Ritual and Feeling in the Novels of George Eliot (University of Wales Press, 1973)
Reading of Jane Austen (Peter Owen, 1975)
Tellers and Listeners: Narrative Imagination (Continuum, 1975)
The Advantage of Lyric: Essays on Feeling in Poetry (Continuum, 1977)
Dramatic Quicklyisms: Malapropic Wordplay Techniques in Shakepseare’s Henriad: Vol 1 and 2 (Renaissance Studies) (Edwin Mellen Press, 1979) 
Particularities: Readings in George Eliot (Peter Owen, 1982)
Charles Dickens (Writers & Their Work Series) (Profile Books, 1983)
Forms of Feeling in Victorian Fiction (Peter Owen, 1985)
Collected Papers: Narrators and Novelists vol. 1 (Prentice Hall, 1987)
Shakespeare’s Self–concious Art (University of Lethbridge Press, 1989)
Tennyson and the Novelists (Tennyson Society, 1993)
Henry James: The Later Writing (Writers & Their Work Series) (Northcote House, 1995)
Shakespeare’s Storytellers (Peter Owen 1997)
Exposure of Luxury Thackery (Peter Owen, 1998)
Dylan Thomas: an Original Language (Georgia University Press, 2000)
Thomas Hardy: Imagining Imagination in Hardy’s Poetry and Fiction (Continuum, 2000)
George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (Writers Lives Series) (Continuum, 2006) 
Dickens and Creativity (Continuum, 2008)

Poetry
London Lovers (Peter Owen, 1996)
Severn Bridge: New and Selected Poems (Shoestring Press, 2001)
The Yellow Carpet (Shoestring Press, 2006)

Memoir
Swansea Girl: A Memoir (Peter Owen, 1993)



Swansea Girl: A Memoir (Peter Owen, 1993)

Swansea Girl is a recollection of childhood and adolescence in the ’20s, ’30s and ’40s, told with an attractive candour and made vivid by the author’s remarkable eye for detail. The author groups her memories into themes, forming a broadly sequential pattern – mother and father, brother and cousins, schools, culture, politics, religion, sex and love. And she shows us how the lives of her parents were shaped by history, in particular by the two World Wars, the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the ’30s Depression. The emphasis of this appealing story is on family life, with its rich throng of relations, friends and languages, and their compelling influences.

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London Lovers (Peter Owen, 1996)

London Lovers is an account of a woman’s search for sensual and social liberation. The novel follows Florence Jones from South Wales in the 1930s and ’40s to the literary London of the 1970s and ’80s, re-creating the story through the twists and loops of memory. A subtle and humorous first-person narrative cuts across chronology and sequence to interweave memories of Florence’s marriage and love-life and her affair with the American scholar Mick Solomon, which lasts from their meeting until his death fifteen years later.

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George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (Writers Lives Series) (Continuum, 2006) 

George Eliot was one of the leading writers of the Victorian period. This biography offers new insights into Eliot’s life and work focusing on the themes, patterns, relationships, feelings and language common to both her life and writing. Barbara Hardy discusses Eliot’s relations with parents and siblings, her friendships and late brief marriage to the younger John Cross. Setting her life and fiction side by side, Hardy reveals Eliot’s ideas about society, home, foreignness, nature, gender, religion, sex, illness and death and her experiences as translator, journalist, editor and novelist. Drawing on letters, journals, journalism and the memoirs and biographies written by contemporaries, Hardy brings together a biographical approach with close reading of Eliot’s novels to give a combined perspective on her life and art.

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Eligible Writers on Tour subjects offered:
1. Readings from/discussion of own fiction, memoir, poetry
2. The poetry and prose of Dylan Thomas (and English writers)
3. Creative writing workshops in poetry and memoir

AGE RANGE: Adults