JAMES GIBSON is semi-retired but still lecturing, writing and chairing The Hardy Society. He was Head of the Department of English at Dulwich College (1949-1962) and Christ Church College, Canterbury (1962-1982). He is Honorary Vice President and Chairman of the Hardy Society and Honorary Vice President of the Betjeman Society. He was presented by fellow Hardy scholars with festschrift 1994. He is the editor of The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, and the Variorum edition of that work, and of all Hardy's major novels. His acclaimed Literary Life of Hardy was published by Macmillan in 1996.

Acknowledgements Introduction The First Thirty Years: 1840-1870 The Nine Years: 1871-1879 The Ten Years: 1880-1889 The Ten Years: 1890-1899 The Final Years: 1900-1928

Hardy was an unknown architect in 1870, a famous novelist by 1895, and acknowledged as a great novelist, poet and epic-dramatist when he died in 1928. With fame came a never-ending stream of friends and writers anxious to record their impressions of the Grand Old Man of English Literature. Among them were Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon, Gustav Holst, T.E. Lawrence, H.G. Wells, E.M. Forster, Robert Graves, and very many more. Interviews and Recollections is a selection of the most interesting and important of the many hundreds of recollections which have been gathered together by the Editor over many years. It will be of interest to anyone wishing to know more about Hardy's life, thoughts and writings.