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.
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.
xv
He also suggested...
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
Viola Meynell
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
Penelope Fitzgerald
This book produced the first of PF
's shortlistings for the Booker prize.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Valentine Cunningham
in the Times Literary Supplement registered enjoyment of the rich repertoire of odd characters and the Hardy
-like gothic...
Literary responses
Wendy Cope
Reviewer Andrew O'Hagan
, however, applies a withering pen to WC
in a tirade about a general style of anthology which is, he says, frivolous or aimed at the lifestyle or selfhelp markets. His complaint...
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.
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...
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...
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.
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable.
297
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...
