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.
This novel puts its female characters at the centre. Its tightly-interwoven social fabric is reminiscent of George Eliot
; its slow-burning, enduring passions suggest Thomas Hardy
. The way that animals are used as subsidiary...
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.
Others with whom she shared this or that memorable experience were the Meynells (Wilfrid
, Alice
, and Viola
), Clarence Rook
and his wife, and Henry W. Nevinson
, whom she eventually married...
Textual Production
Dora Sigerson
Thomas Hardy
wrote a short Prefatory Note for DS
's posthumous collection A Dull Day in London, and Other Sketches.
Sigerson, Dora, and Thomas Hardy. A Dull Day in London. Eveleigh Nash.
title-page
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
Friends, Associates
Dora Sigerson
After her marriage, DS
became acquainted with a number of notable literary figures, including George Meredith
(who wrote the introduction to The Collected Poems of Dora Sigerson Shorter, 1907), Thomas Hardy
(who wrote the...
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...
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
97
She was delighted with Thomas Hardy
, with whom she went cycling in Dorset in...
Health
May Sinclair
As early as October 1908 MS
was told that she had strained her heart by exercise (her bicycling trip with Thomas Hardy
) and ought to be careful.
Raitt, Suzanne. May Sinclair: A Modern Victorian. Clarendon Press.
113
In view of her family's history...
Family and Intimate relationships
Anne Stevenson
She found motherhood a struggle. She tried to keep up her serious reading (James
, Hardy
, Proust
) while breast-feeding, and to serve an elegant candlelit supper each evening while the baby cried...
Intertextuality and Influence
Lesley Storm
At last Peter confronts and questions Delia directly, and finds that he was indeed the Delia's rapist, though he remembers the encounter between them not as forced, but as mutual: a first bumbling, confused, frightened...
Education
Elizabeth Taylor
Betty Coles's first reading was Beatrix Potter
, then Lewis CarrollAlice in Wonderland and E. Nesbit
, whose Bastable stories she read over and over again. Though her parents were not bookish people she progressed at...
Textual Production
Emma Tennant
Her title, borrowed from that of a poem of pure nostalgia by Thomas Hardy
, suggests the irony with which her protagonist is to be disillusioned over the country-house ideal. The second title in the...
Textual Production
Emma Tennant
In the same year she published Tess, which is based on and continues the story of Hardy
's Tess of the d'Urbervilles.
British Library Catalogue. http://explore.bl.uk/primo_library/libweb/action/search.do?dscnt=0&tab=local_tab&dstmp=1489778087340&vid=BLVU1&mode=Basic&fromLo.
She followed these the next year with a return to Austen