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.
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...
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable.
297
Publishing
Margaret Oliphant
Blackwood's published MO
's The Anti-Marriage League, a critique of Thomas Hardy
's Jude the Obscure.
Greenfield, John R., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 159. Gale Research.
159: 254
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press.
116
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...
Occupation
Frances Horovitz
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...
Thomas Hardy
was very much impressed by the volume, and requested a meeting with CM
at his home. He judged her far and away the best living woman poet—who will be remembered when others are...
Literary responses
John Oliver Hobbes
More recently, Margaret Maison
characterised The School For Saints as a strange mixture of Disraeli
, Hardy
, Ouida
, and Meredith
. . . and there are even echoes of the old bigamy novels...