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.
Black-and-white, head-and-shoulders photograph of Thomas Hardy by London Stereoscopic. He has a thin handlebar moustache, and wears a jacket and patterned tie with a stiff collar.

Connections

Connections Author name Excerpt
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 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 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 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.
19
, 1976, pp. 25-34.
29
VH received...
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 Setting Olive Schreiner
Cherry Clayton believes the novel's fictional English setting, Greenwood, was influenced by the English landscapes in the works of Hardy , George Eliot , and the BrontësEmily BrontëAnne Brontë . Schreiner herself had not yet been to...
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...
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 Catherine Cookson
Cookson collaborated with Piers Dudgeon on Catherine Cookson Country, one in a Heinemann series of historical photographs that had already covered the localities of Wordsworth and Thomas Hardy .
Whitaker’s Books in Print. J. Whitaker and Sons, 1988–2003.
(1988)
Jones, Kathleen. Catherine Cookson: The Biography. Constable, 1999.
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, 1996.
159: 254
Jay, Elisabeth. Mrs Oliphant: "A Fiction to Herself": A Literary Life. Clarendon Press, 1995.
116
Reception Charlotte Mew
CM was awarded a Civil List pension of £75 a year on the recommendation of John Masefield , Thomas Hardy , and Walter de la Mare .
Monro, Alida, and Charlotte Mew. “Charlotte Mew—A Memoir”. Collected Poems of Charlotte Mew, Gerald Duckworth, 1953, p. vii - xx.
xv
Stanford, Donald E., editor. Dictionary of Literary Biography 19. Gale Research, 1983.
311
Reception John Oliver Hobbes
The bronze portrait memorial to JOH was unveiled at University College, London , by Lord Curzon in the presence of herparents , assorted peers and dignitaries, and writers including Thomas Hardy and Anthony Hope
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...
Reception Laurence Hope
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...

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