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.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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...
Family and Intimate relationships Virginia Woolf
VW 's father, Sir Leslie Stephen (1832-1904), was a Victorian philosopher and historian of ideas . . . literary historian and critic, and—perhaps most important—a biographer.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, pp. 32-56.
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Mark Hussey writes that he was, after Matthew Arnold
Family and Intimate relationships Virginia Woolf
He was immensely influential. As editor of the Cornhill Magazine from 1871 to 1882, he published Henry James , Thomas Hardy , Matthew Arnold , Robert Browning , and George Meredith , among others.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, pp. 32-56.
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Dedications Mary Webb
She had finished this book towards the end of the previous year, and dedicated it by permission to Thomas Hardy .
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press.
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Literary responses Mary Webb
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...
Friends, Associates Rosamund Marriott Watson
She was introduced to writer Thomas Hardy some time in 1889. They had a flirtation (both in person and by letter) which left Hardy the disappointed partner,
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell.
581
possibly after she rejected his advances in...
Textual Features Rosamund Marriott Watson
The title poem, which first appeared in the January 1889 issue of Harper's Magazine, reworks the familiar swan-maiden story.
Hughes, Linda K. “’Fair <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Hymen</span> holdeth hid a world of woes’: Myth and Marriage in Poems by ’Graham R. Tomson’ (Rosamund Marriott Watson)”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
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, No. 2, pp. 97-120.
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This poem (largely about forced marriage, possession, and broken promises) is narrated by an...
Textual Production Rosamund Marriott Watson
In 1894 RMW (as Graham R. Tomson) published in the American Independent two articles about Thomas Hardy , whom she had met in 1889.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell.
581
He may have used her a couple of years...
Textual Features Rosamund Marriott Watson
In addition to poems from all her previous volumes, the book includes The Story of Marpessa, which first appeared in the Universal Review in September 1889. This poem is a critique of marriage adapted...
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...
Literary responses Sylvia Townsend Warner
Louis Untermeyer , an early supporter of STW 's poetry, commented favourably on her marked accent,half-modern, half-archaic blend of naivete and erudition, and the low-pitched but tart tone of voice.
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Editorial Materials”. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Carcanet New Press, pp. xi - xxiii; 275.
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He also suggested...
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.
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whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family...
Reception Lucy Walford
In 1887 Coventry Patmore said of LW that her depictions of contemporary life far surpassed those of Dickens , Thackeray , Trollope , Eliot , and Gaskell , declaring her work to be equalled only...
Friends, Associates Katharine Tynan
In LondonKT met the politician William Gladstone (a supporter of Home Rule for Ireland) at a party given for Charles Parnell .
Tynan, Katharine. Twenty-Five Years: Reminiscences. Smith, Elder.
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On another occasion, she attended a garden-party given by feminist novelist...
Family and Intimate relationships Iris Tree
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm was IT 's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote...

Timeline

1876: John Maxwell sold Belgravia to Chatto and...

Writing climate item

1876

John Maxwell sold Belgravia to Chatto and Windus , ending Mary Elizabeth Braddon 's association with the monthly.

October 1877: Charles Kegan Paul arranged to purchase the...

Writing climate item

October 1877

Charles Kegan Paul arranged to purchase the publishing firm of his employer H. S. King to form Kegan Paul and Co.

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.
Hardy, Thomas. Desperate Remedies. Tinsley Brothers, 1871.
Hardy, Thomas, and Helen Allingham. Far from the Madding Crowd. Smith, Elder, 1874.
Hardy, Thomas. “General Introduction”. Tess of the D’Urbervilles, edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Gatrell, Clarendon Press, 1983, pp. 1-103.
Hardy, Thomas. Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs, and Trifles. Macmillan, 1925.
Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Osgood, McIlvaine, 1895.
Hardy, Thomas. Late Lyrics and Earlier : with many other Verses. Macmillan, 1922.
Hardy, Thomas. Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses. Macmillan, 1917.
Hardy, Thomas. Our Exploits at West Poley. Oxford University Press, 1952.
Hardy, Thomas, and Dora Sigerson. “Prefatory Note”. A Dull Day in London, Eveleigh Nash, 1920, pp. 7-8.
Hardy, Thomas. Satires of Circumstance. Macmillan, 1914.
Hardy, Thomas. Tess of the D’Urbervilles. Osgood, McIlvaine, 1891.
Hardy, Thomas. The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy. Editors Purdy, Richard Little and Michael Millgate, Clarendon Press, 1988.
Hardy, Thomas. The Dynasts. Macmillan, 1908.
Hardy, Thomas. The Early Life of Thomas Hardy 1840-1891. Editor Hardy, Florence, Macmillan, 1928.
Hardy, Thomas. The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892-1928. Editor Hardy, Florence, Macmillan, 1930.
Hardy, Thomas. The Mayor of Casterbridge. Smith, Elder, 1886.
Hardy, Thomas. The Return of the Native. Smith, Elder, 1878.
Hardy, Thomas. The Well-Beloved. Osgood, McIlvaine, 1897.
Hardy, Thomas. Under the Greenwood Tree. Tinsley Brothers, 1872.
Hardy, Thomas. Wessex Poems. Harper and Brothers, 1898.
Hardy, Thomas. Winter Words. Macmillan, 1928.