Michael Millgate is University Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Toronto. He has edited seven volumes of Hardy's letters, and the selected letters of his wives.

"Millgate amplifies his much-admired 1982 life of the novelist, drawing on new archival material. This is one of those thick, well-written biographies one can happily lose oneself in."--Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World

"One of the many achievements of Michael Millgate's seminal biography of Hardy, appearing now in a revised and expanded edition two decades after its original publication, is its careful depiction of just how the author was able to take the raw material of his rural youth and turn it into what Millgate called 'a total imaginative world with a solid, complex, and comprehensively realized existence in space and time.'"--The Globe and Mail [Toronto]

"Since [the] first edition, Millgate has edited an impressive array of materials on Hardy.... Millgate's immersion in these materials caused him to reconsider several facets of Hardy's life and career. For example, Millgate provides here a fresh treatment of Hardy's upbringing in rural Dorchester and offers an insightful analysis of Hardy's complicated attitudes about class. Millgate also creates a sophisticated, balanced view of Hardy's two wives.... Beautifully written and meticulously researched by the world's leading Hardy scholar, this book replaces the earlier edition. Essential."--Choice

"Milllgate's Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited has been so thoroughly revised and updated that it fully merits the new title. Millgate has ample new findings to draw on (other scholars' and his own), and the updated work is likely to be the standard biography for at least another twenty years."--Studies in English Literature 1500-1900 "Few biographers have the good fortune to be able to rewrite so fully a major study twenty years later, and Millgate has made the most of it."--English Literature in Transition 1880-1920

Praise for the previous edition: "The standard biography, indispensable to all who covet the particulars of Hardy's life."--Times Higher Education Supplement

"By far the most detailed and comprehensive account of Hardy's personal and literary life now available."--Times Literary Supplement

"A splendid biography.... Millgate is the kind of biographer who writers dream of. He gives us all the necessary details, but none of the gratuitous ones."--The New York Times

"There has been no better account of the genesis and production of the novels, and of the magnitude of both the achievement and the cost."--New Statesman