Biographical/historical: Thomas Hardy was a British writer of novels, short stories, plays (including historical dramas), poetry, and essays.
Content: This is a synthetic collection consisting of manuscripts and typescripts, correspondence from, to, and about the author, financial and legal documents, portraits, and pictorial works. The manuscripts and typescripts include stories, essays, poems, drafts of novels, and press clippings. The correspondence includes letters, dating from 1872 to 1926, from the author to Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, William Morris Colles, Edmund Gosse, Lady Gregory, Bret Harte, John Hartman Morgan, John Middleton Murray, Clement King Shorter, W. Tinsley, Arthur Tomson, Virginia Woolf, and others. Also included are letters relating to the author, dating from 1905 to 1964, between various correspondents including Arnold Bennett, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, Lascelles Abercrombie, Siegfried Sassoon, Edith Sitwell, Rebecca West, Geoffrey Grigson, William Butler Yeats, and A. P. Watt & Son. There are letters to Hardy from William Morris Colles, George Du Maurier, John Galsworthy, Edward Howard Marsh, Leslie Stephen, Anthony Trollope, and others, dating from 1875 through 1919.