Böcker av Barbara Hardy

George Eliot (1819-1880) was one of the leading writers of the Victorian period and one of Britain's great novelists. This biography offers insights into Eliot's life and work focusing on the themes, patterns, relationships, feelings and language common to her life and writing. It offers an illuminating portrait of her as a woman and a writer.

Charles Dickens' experience and imagining of creativity is at the heart of his self-awareness, subject-matter and narrative. This book covers Dickens and creativity, analysing both his discussion of creativity and imagination and illustrations in his work.

Ivy Compton-Burnett is a strikingly original novelist, writing conversation-novels in which talk is the medium and subject. She is innovative like Joyce and Woolf but more accessible and less theoretical, a modernist unawares. She makes readers think and her terse cool witty style reminds us that the novel is an art. To read most living writers of fiction after reading her is to feel novelists have become lazy and made their readers lazy. She requires attention, and she doesn't write to pass the time or invite identification, but she is amusing and challenging. This re-valuation of a neglected artist is a close analysis of forms, ideas and language in novels which range from her first conventionally moral love-story, Dolores, which she tried to suppress, to startling stories about landed gentry in Victorian and Edwardian England.

The author of this text offers close readings of Thomas Hardy's poetry and novels, regarding these as expressive forms for the discovery of everyday and professional acts of imagination.