Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Thomas Hardy
-
Standard Name: Hardy, Thomas
TH
was a poet by vocation and became a novelist by profession. The Wessex of his novels has made him arguably a regional novelist. As well as a prolific output in both these forms, he published a unique verse epic bringing together human and supernatural characters, short fiction, a volume for children, and two volumes of actual autobiography masquerading as a biography by his second wife. Since his career as a publishing novelist ran from the 1870s to the 1890s, and his first volume of poetry post-dated his final novel, he has been seen as a Victorian novelist but a mostly twentieth-century poet. This description, however, is not true to the facts of composition. He wrote poetry from early in his life, but did not publish it in volume form until his final novel.
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
Literary responses
Dora Sigerson
Hardy
's preface addresses the unrealised potential of the dead writer: while the sketches are not unfinished in execution, their brevity leads a reader to muse on what the author's achievements in the same kind...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
Boots
the chemist, which operated circulating libraries in its shops, refused to the stock this novel (as it already refused VH
's Sooner or Later) because of its alleged sensationalism.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster.
146-7
Secor, Marie. “Violet Hunt, Novelist: A Reintroduction”. English Literature in Transition, Vol.
This exemplifies the double-edged nature of MW
's reputation. On the one hand she has become almost synonymous in the public mind with the genre she made famous: the romantic, earthy, rural novel. Her early...
Literary responses
Lucas Malet
Thomas Hardy
told LM
after reading this novel that she was one of the few authors of the other sex who are not afraid of logical consequences.
“Dictionary of Literary Biography online”. Gale Databases: Literature Resource Center-LRC.
153
He also said that the wages of...
Literary responses
Victoria Cross
Sewell Stokes
, in a brief portrait of VC
in 1928, described her as one who had at one time been accused of poisoning the purity of British homes with her sordid writings ....
Through this experience she met the literary biographer Robert Gittings
. She built with him a professional partnership to work on interpretations of John Keats
and Thomas Hardy
, of whom Gittings was writing biographies...
Author summary
Charlotte Mew
Charlotte Mew is best known and regarded as an early twentieth century poet, though she also published a few short stories and essays. Her poems, often dramatic monologues, are haunted by unrequited love, the renunciation...
Hope's work was popular, and was recognised by a number of her contemporaries, including Thomas Hardy
, Arthur Symons
, James Elroy Flecker
, and Edith Thomas
. After her death she garnered, along with...
Reception
Arnold Bennett
This novel won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize, and Bennett was buoyed up by positive reviews from J. B. Priestley
, H. G. Wells
, Joseph Conrad
and Thomas Hardy
. He was annoyed...