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.
Alice Meynell
initially felt that the book was too personal and outspoken. She asked Viola to lessen and modify and veil the detailed and repeated record of caresses, and added: These are things that are...
Literary responses
Victoria Cross
Sewell Stokes
, in a brief portrait of VC
in 1928, described her as one who had at one time been accused of poisoning the purity of British homes with her sordid writings ....
Literary responses
Laurence Hope
A number of evaluations of Hope's work appeared at her death. Thomas Hardy
's obituary for her, printed in the Athenæum, praised the tropical luxuriance and Sapphic
fervour of The Garden of Káma...
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...
Literary responses
Edna St Vincent Millay
Thomas Hardy
(as reported by Elinor Wylie
) is believed to have said her poems were one of the only two great things in the United States, the other being the skyscraper.
Milford, Nancy. Savage Beauty: The Life of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Random House, 2001.
xiii, 290
To...
Literary responses
Toni Morrison
Maureen Howard
in the New Republic discerned a new lightness and brilliance in this novel and called it, despite its elements of fantasy, a highly realistic novel, full of the actual riddles, the unanswerable questions...
Literary responses
Dora Sigerson
Hardy
's preface addresses the unrealised potential of the dead writer: while the sketches are not unfinished in execution, their brevity leads a reader to muse on what the author's achievements in the same kind...
Literary responses
Violet Hunt
Boots
the chemist, which operated circulating libraries in its shops, refused to the stock this novel (as it already refused VH
's Sooner or Later) because of its alleged sensationalism.
Belford, Barbara. Violet. Simon and Schuster, 1990.
146-7
Secor, Marie. “Violet Hunt, Novelist: A Reintroduction”. English Literature in Transition, Vol.
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.
qtd. in
Warner, Sylvia Townsend. “Editorial Materials”. Sylvia Townsend Warner: Collected Poems, edited by Claire Harman, Carcanet New Press, 1982, pp. xi - xxiii; 275.
xv
He also suggested...
Literary responses
Vita Sackville-West
The enthusiastic review by J. C. Squire
was not entirely welcome to VSW
, since she regarded Squire as a silly old ass and all that.
qtd. in
Glendinning, Victoria. Vita. Penguin, 1984.
167
She feared being relegated to the category of...
Literary responses
T. S. Eliot
During TSE
's last years he reaped a rich harvest of public honours, both in Britain and internationally. Since then his standing as leading poet of the modernist movement and dominant figure of twentieth-century English...
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.
