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.
This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:...
Intertextuality and Influence
Helen Dunmore
These poems deal in passing time and final partings, with the sudden recognition of changes accumulated over years. The magic cloak of invisibility longed for by children comes in the end unsought for and the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Mary Augusta Ward
It is set in the late nineteenth-century on the boundary between Westmorland and Lancashire, an exquisite country
Ward, Mary Augusta. Helbeck of Bannisdale. Editor Worthington, Brian, Penguin.
86
whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margiad Evans
As a story-teller Evans has a sure grasp, making every tiny detail contribute to an effect which is understated but emotionally powerful. The named character in Miss Potts and Music is largely a peg for...
Intertextuality and Influence
Sarah Waters
Nance is almost a colourless character apart from her capacity for passion. (In an apparently non-literary book, a tradition of steamy fiction is evoked when her desire to make Kitty sorry makes her think of...
Intertextuality and Influence
Margiad Evans
Several poems in A Candle Ahead invoke ME
's teachers: Milton
, Thomas Traherne
, Walter de la Mare
, and Thomas Hardy
, the theme of whose The Well-Beloved is that of her closing...
Intertextuality and Influence
Violet Hunt
Acquainted with Andrew Lang
through her mother
's social circle, VH
shaped her own poetry under his influence. Partly because of Lang's connections, her romantic poem The Death of the Shameful Knight was published in...
Intertextuality and Influence
Stella Gibbons
Such earthy regionalists—who include Thomas Hardy
and D. H. Lawrence
, as well as Webb
and Kaye-Smith
—become the butt of SG
's satire in Cold Comfort Farm.
Oliver, Reggie. Out of the Woodshed: A Portrait of Stella Gibbons. Bloomsbury.
Bowker, Gordon. “Obituary: Cecily Mackworth”. The Independent.
Mackworth, Cecily. Out of the Black Mountains.
17
Friends, Associates
Frances Cornford
Frances's association with Rupert Brooke
began with the rehearsals for the play and grew into friendship. They discussed their poetry with each other, and Frances counselled and consoled Rupert in his many love affairs. She...
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
97
She was delighted with Thomas Hardy
, with whom she went cycling in Dorset in...
Friends, Associates
Victoria Cross
Possibly because VC
spent so much time travelling, it is difficult to judge the extent of her social circle. She is unmentioned by many literary autobiographies of the period. Charlotte Mitchell
suggests that she may...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
VW
and Leonard travelled to Dorchester to have tea at Max Gate with Thomas
and Florence Hardy
. Woolf met Hardy just this once, though, as Hermione Lee remarks, she had been reading and writing...
