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.
Kennedy shifts gears in this work to focus on a young girl's experience in learning about life and love. She foregrounds this theme by means of a quotation from Thomas Hardy
's Tess of the...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
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
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, 1983.
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
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
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
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, 1998.
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
Violet Hunt
VH
was fascinated by the mysterious throughout her life. As a small girl, she loved to listen to her mother talk about the White Lady, a spirit haunting the kitchen of Margaret Hunt
's...
Intertextuality and Influence
Alice Munro
Carried Away begins with two lonely young people building an unlikely relationship by letter. Louisa, town librarian of Carstairs, Ontario, in 1917, lives in a hotel and eats her solitary meal each day with...
Intertextuality and Influence
P. D. James
As the work opens, Cordelia, slight of body, determined of will, savvy of mind
Gidez, Richard. P. D. James. Twayne, 1986.
56
(who is to reappear later in another book, The Skull Beneath the Skin), is running a seedy detective agency...
Who Was Who in Literature, 1906-1934. Gale Research, 1979.
vol. 1
She also belonged to the Society of Authors
, and acted as a steward (along with over a hundred other luminaries including Walter Besant
Leisure and Society
Lucas Malet
Schaffer writes that she re-invented herself by means of her change in appearance between 1892, when Thomas Hardy
found her tall and striking in looks and likeable in manner, and a decade later, when an...
Literary responses
Sheila Kaye-Smith
This novel brought critical and popular acclaim. SKS
said that the weeks following its appearance were some of the happiest of her life.