Question

Q5. Who do you judge as a tragic fiction writer between Dickens and Hardy, and why?​

Answer 1

Answer:

Ahead of February's bicentennial celebration of Dickens's birth, both Oxford fellow Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, literature scholar, and prizewinning biographer Claire Tomalin, whose previous subjects have included Thomas Hardy, are offering up their takes on the great writer.

Douglas-Fairhurst's Becoming Dickens is the latest how-an-author-got-his-spots story—think Shakespeare in Love and Becoming Jane—which is not to say it is remotely frivolous or unoriginal work. The prologue opens with a description of a 1855 computer-accessorized but Reform Bill-free London that never existed, a meta-nod to Douglas-Fairhurst's thesis: that Charles Dickens was a man alternately fascinated and haunted by counterfactuals. It is not the only artistic wink in the book, which includes such chapter titles as "Novelist Writer" and "Is She His Wife?", the title of an 1837 Dickens play and simultaneously a revealing heading for the chapter in which Douglas-Fairhurst discusses Dickens's much-debated relationship with his wife's sister Mary, who died tragically young.

Answer 2

Explanation:

Ahead of February's bicentennial celebration of Dickens's birth, both Oxford fellow Robert Douglas-Fairhurst, literature scholar, and prizewinning biographer Claire Tomalin, whose previous subjects have included Thomas Hardy, are offering up their takes on the great writer