Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Thomas Hardy
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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.
Colles, Hester Janet. “A Gallery of Children”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1245, p. 804.
804
Sales in...
Education
Margaret Atwood
She attended elementary school, and then from 1952 Leaside High School
in Toronto, both in the Protestant public school system operating in Ontario alongside a Catholic one. She and her schoolmates got prayers and...
Intertextuality and Influence
W. H. Auden
While an undergraduate at Oxford (from October 1925) he discovered T. S. Eliot
, and was for a while obsessively modernist, as he had previously been traditional in the style of Thomas Hardy
. He...
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
The title, from Hardy
, carries connotations of blind, indifferent fate directing the course of human existence.
Theme or Topic Treated in Text
Marjorie Bowen
MB
credits British women novelists for modifying the methods of the great European novelists, noting in particular Dorothy Richardson
's perfection of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She draws a contrast between Dorothy Richardson
's Miriam and...
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:...
Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
RB
's vitality, sincerity, and pungent wit gained her the friendship of some of the most notable people of her day.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Her wide circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James
(the two became extremely...
Textual Features
Frances Hodgson Burnett
The male protagonist, James Murdoch, an awkward and rough Lancashire factory owner, is considered by Gretchen Gerzina
to be an uncanny prefiguration of Thomas Hardy
's Henchard, Mayor of Casterbridge (in his novel of 1886).
Gerzina, Gretchen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Chatto and Windus.
May 1893: The Pall Mall Magazine began monthly publication;...
Writing climate item
May 1893
The Pall Mall Magazine began monthly publication; it ran until September 1914.
2 September 1914: The British War Propaganda Bureau (newly...
Writing climate item
2 September 1914
The British War Propaganda Bureau
(newly formed along the lines of a similar body in Germany) summoned twenty-five writers to discuss the production of texts that would boost national feeling and the war effort.
1952: The seventy-eight-year-old Somerset Maugham...
Writing climate item
1952
The seventy-eight-year-old Somerset Maugham
confided to his former headmaster that he believed that the Order of Merit was something that they ought to award him, as the greatest living writer of English.
June 1966: Anthropologist Mary Douglas published her...
Women writers item
June 1966
AnthropologistMary Douglas
published her best-known work, Purity and Danger, a study of ritual behaviour and taboo.
Texts
Sigerson, Dora, and Thomas Hardy. A Dull Day in London. Eveleigh Nash, 1920.
Hardy, Thomas. A Pair of Blue Eyes. Tinsley Brothers, 1873.