From Thursday 3rd April 2025 until Sunday 6th April 2025
All day event
The Steward’s Office Christ Church, Oxford, OX1 1DP

The Late Great Thomas Hardy

Details are:

Special Interest Event: The Late Great Thomas Hardy
Dates: Thursday 3rd April 2025 – Sunday 6th April 2025.

Every Spring Christ Church hosts our Special Interest Event, where a group of specialists discuss the chosen topic in a series of lectures during the four-day event.

The programme fee is £781.00 per person and the en-suite supplement is £107 per room.
The fee includes the full lecture programme, three nights’ accommodation, all meals, dinner wines and refreshments as timetabled. Gratuities are not expected.
Full payment must be made at the time of booking.
A full refund [subject to an administration fee] will be offered in the event of cancellations made up to and including 60 days prior to the start of the event. No refunds will be offered after this time.
All monies are held by Christ Church.

Please direct enquiries to: Special Interest Event, The Steward’s Office Christ Church, Oxford, OX1 1DP Tel: 44 (0)1865 276174 Email: specialinterest@chch.ox.ac.uk

Book online: https://www.chch.ox.ac.uk/visit/special-interest-event

We haven't got the programme completely in place or a brochure made yet but I can send you this info as soon as we have it.

Almost a century after his death on the 11th Jan 1928, Thomas Hardy’s life and work continues to attract admiration and controversy. Paula Byrne’s recently published biographical study Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses has renewed interest in the author’s innovative depiction of female agency and female desire and his profound sympathy with women inspired, in part, by the strong female role models in his own life and those whom he observed in the rural and urban environment. Ironically, many of his biographers have found this sympathy lacking in his personal dealings with some of the women closest to him.

The publication of Hardy’s last great tragic, and most controversial, novel Jude the Obscure in 1895 (much of which is set in an imagined Oxford or ‘Christminster), featuring his most psychologically complex female character Sue Bridehead, aroused such hostility that Hardy abandoned novel-writing altogether to concentrate on publishing shorter fiction and establishing himself as a poet, which he always declared to have been his primary ambition.