Thomas Hardy Annual No. 1

218 Pages·1982·19.406 MB·English

by  Norman Page (eds.)

THOMAS HARDY ANNUAL No. 1
The Thomas Hardy Annual will make available some of the most important
critical and scholarly work arising from the new recognition of Hardy's
status and significance, and this opening volume reflects a wide variety of
approaches and an international interest. Among the topics covered in the
essays in this volume are Hardyan biography, the sociological approach to
Hardy, Hardy and feminism, Hardy's notebooks, and the metrics of
Hardy's poetry; among the contributors are such well-known scholars as
John Bayley, Tom Paulin, Arthur Pollard and Merryn Williams. In
addition to the essays there are reviews of recent books; a reconsideration
of Donald Davie's important study of Hardy's poetry; and a survey and
bibliography of recent Hardy studies (the first instalment of what will
become a continuous and comprehensive listing).
The editor
Norman Page is Professor of English at the University of Alberta,
Canada. A graduate of the Universities of Cambridge and Leeds, he has
held a Guggenheim Fellowship and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada.
He has lectured widely on Hardy and other authors, and his publications
include The Language ofJ ane Austen, Speech in the English Novel, E. M.
Forster's Posthumous Fiction and Thomas Hardy, as well as edited volumes on
Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Tennyson, Hardy, D. H. Lawrence and
Nabokov.
In the same series
O'CASEY ANNUAL Nos 1 and 2
Edited by Robert G. Lowery
YEATS ANNUAL Nos 1 and 2
Edited by Richard J. Finneran
Further titles in preparation
THOMAS HARDY
ANNUAL No. 1
Edited by Norman Page
©Norman Page 1982
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1982
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
without permission
First published 1982 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-16971-9 ISBN 978-1-349-16969-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-16969-6
Typeset by
Scarborough Typesetting Services
Contents
Editor's Note v1
The Contributors vu
Editor's Introduction
IX
'Old Tom and New Tom': Hardy and His Biographers Peter].
Casagrande 1
Hardy and Rural England Arthur Pollard 33
Hardy and 'the Woman Question' Merryn Williams 44
The Love Story in Two on a Tower John Bayley 60
The Experimental and the Absurd in Two on a Tower Rosemary
Sumner 71
Fifty Years On Christopher Wiseman 82
'Words, in all their intimate accents' Tom Paulin 84
Hardy's Use of the Hair Motif Peter W. Coxon 95
Hardy and His 'Literary Notes' Lennart A. Bjork 115
Three Unpublished Letters by John Addington Symonds 129
Thomas Hardy, Donald Davie, England and the English John
Lucas 134
A Survey of Recent Hardy Studies Richard H. Taylor 152
Dennis Taylor: Hardy's Poetry, 1860-1928 and Patricia Clements and
Juliet Grindle (eds): The Poetry of Thomas Hardy P. N. Furbank 172
Jeannette King, Tragedy in the Victorian Novel Juliet McMaster 177
R. L. Purdy and M. Millgate (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas
Hardy, vol. 2 Norman Page 181
Reviews in Brief Norman Page 188
A Hardy Bibliography, 1978-81 Richard H. Taylor 190
v
Editor's Note
Contributions for future volumes of the Annual are welcome at any time.
There is no limit on length, and illustrations may be included where appro
priate. Contributions should be typewritten (double-space throughout,
including quotations and footnotes). References to Hardy's novels should
be identified by chapter-number, thus: (The Woodlanders, Ch. 10). Foot
notes should be kept to a minimum and brief references worked into the
text wherever possible.
All contributions, correspondence and books for review should be sent
to the editor at the Department of English, University of Alberta,
Edmonton, Alberta, Canada T6G 2ES; or at 41 Trent Road, Oakham,
Rutland LEtS 6HE, UK.
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The Contributors
John Bayley is Warton Professor of English Literature at Oxford and a
Fellow ofSt Catherine's College. His books include The Romantic Survival
(1956), The Characters of Love (1961), The Uses of Division (1976) and An
Essay on Hardy (1978).
Lennart A. Bjork is Professor of English at the University of Stockholm
and editor of The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy.
Peter J. Casagrande is Professor of English at the University of Kansas.
He is the author of Unity in Hardy's Novels (1982) and of many articles on
Hardy.
Peter W. Coxon is a lecturer in the Department of Hebrew and Old
Testament at the University of St Andrews. He has published widely on
Semitic philology and Biblical criticism, and his interest in the nineteenth
century novel has resulted in several articles on Hardy.
P. N. Furbank is Reader in English at the Open University. He is general
editor of the New Wessex Edition of Hardy's novels and has published a
selection of Hardy's poems. His other books include Samuel Butler,
1835-1902 (1948), Reflections on the Word 'Image' (1970), Italo Svevo: The
Man and the Writer (1966), and E. M. Forster: A Life (1977-8).
John Lucas is Professor of English at Loughborough University of Tech
nology. His books include Arnold Bennett (1974), The Literature of Change:
Studies in the Nineteenth-Century Provincial Novel (1977), and The Melancholy
Man: A Study of Dickens' Novels (1970). He has also edited Literature and
Politics in the Nineteenth Century (1971) and The 1930s (1978).
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Vlll The Contributors
Juliet McMaster is Professor of English at the University of Alberta. Her
books include Thackeray: The Major Novels (1971) and Trollope's Palliser
Novels: Theme and Pattern (1978), and she is the editor of Jane Austen's
Achievement (1976).
Tom Paulin is Lecturer in English at the University of Nottingham. He
has published Thomas Hardy: The Poetry of Perception (1975) as well as
various collections of verse, including The Strange Museum (1980).
Arthur Pollard is Professor of English at the University of Hull. He has
published Mrs Gaskell (1965), Charlotte Bronte (1968), Satire (1970) and
Anthony Trollope (1978), and has edited Crabbe: The Critical Heritage (1972)
and (with]. A. V. Chapple) The Letters of Mrs Gaskell (1966).
Rosemary Sumner is Principal Lecturer at the University of London
Goldsmiths' College. She is the author of Thomas Hardy: Psychological
Novelist (1981).
Richard H. Taylor is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of
London Institute of Education, currently on secondment to the University
Teaching Methods Unit. He is the author of The Neglected Hardy (1982)
and the editor of The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (1978). He is
currently at work on a bibliography of Hardy criticism.
Merryn Williams was formerly a Lecturer in English at the Open
University. She is the author of Thomas Hardy and Rural England (1972) and
of A Preface to Hardy (1976), and has edited Revolutions, 1775-1830 (1971).
Christopher Wiseman is Professor of English at the University of
Calgary and has published poetry and criticism, including Beyond the
Labyrinth: A Study of Edwin Muir's Poetry (1978).
Editor's Introduction
Hardy once said that, although he was not a best-seller, he was a long
seller. It is true that he published no book that had the instant and pro
digious success of, say, Mrs Humphry Ward's Robert Elsmere, which
appeared one year later than The Woodlanders; but, half a century after his
death, while Mrs Humphry Ward and her works are almost forgotten, his
popularity stands higher than ever - at least if one can judge by paperback
reprints, television serials, fan clubs, tourist publicity, and other manifest
ations of widely diverse kinds, including such unlikely phenomena as a
map of Hardy's Wessex distributed gratis by a generous brewer and the
recent alliance of Hardy's talents with those of Mr Roman Polanski. In the
week in which I write these words, I have chanced to come across a pub
lisher's announcement of a new and lavishly illustrated selection of Hardy's
poems; some references to his novels in Q. D. Leavis's lecture on 'The
Englishness of the English Novel'; a poem by Brian Aldiss titled 'Thomas
Hardy Considers the Newly-Published Special Theory of Relativity' (The
Times Literary Supplement, 25 September 1981); and a review of a recent
novel, Philip Rock's Circles of Time, in which a character suffering from
shell-shock is cured by reading the poems of Hardy - four quite different
and not altogether predictable manifestations of the wide currency now
enjoyed by Hardy's work and by what he is seen as having stood for. Not
long ago a survey of sixth-formers' tastes in books showed Hardy to be top
of the list; and while such surveys may invite insincerity, the result is so
striking as not to be easily discounted.1 Hardy, it is clear, is too big to
belong only to the academic establishment; if there are great writers who
are kept alive by being studied rather than by being read, Hardy is not one
of them. His work continues to possess a life - a vitality that, in John
sonian phrase, preserves it from putrefaction - quite independent of the
classroom and the seminar, the learned journal and the examination paper.
And yet Hardy belongs to the scholars and critics too; and they are
showing nowadays a livelier interest in him than ever before. The
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