Tim Dolin

Tim Dolin works in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. He is the author of George Eliot (2005) and Thomas Hardy (2008), and co-editor of Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies (2004). He is the author of essays and chapters on nineteenth-century fiction, and editor of novels by Hardy, Charlottë Bronte, and Elizabeth Gaskell. He is presently editing a digital edition of The Return of the Native and writing The Real Hardy Country, a study of the contested meanings and uses of Wessex since Hardy’s death.

Tim Dolin reviews ‘Hardy Women: Mothers, sisters, wives, muses’ by Paula Byrne

October 2024, no. 469 • 25 September 2024

We look to literary biography to understand how works of literature came into being and made their way in the world. But how much can we learn about the processes of artistic creativity from biography when the public self of the author almost completely effaces the private self of the writer: when we are left wondering how this person, of all people, could have created the works that bear their na ... (read more)

Tim Dolin reviews 'Self Impression: Life-Writing, Autobiografiction, and the Forms of Modern Literature' by Max Saunders

April 2011, no. 330 • 24 March 2011

The argument of Self Impression, if it has just one, is that literary modernism, despite T.S. Eliot’s decree that it should strive after objectivity and impersonality, was more or less continuously involved in experiments with forms of life writing: autobiography, biography, memoir, journals, letters, and diaries. But Max Saunders is not interested in the obvious – Paul Morel as a version of y ... (read more)