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.
Writer, critic, and caricaturist Sir Max Beerbohm
was IT
's half-uncle, the youngest son from Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's father's second marriage. Best remembered for his drawings and caricatures of the famous, Beerbohm also wrote...
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.
86
whose landscape has a profound effect in the narrative. Alan Helbeck, of an old Catholic family...
Literary responses
Sylvia Townsend Warner
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...
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...
Friends, Associates
Rosamund Marriott Watson
She was introduced to writer Thomas Hardy
some time in 1889. They had a flirtation (both in person and by letter) which left Hardy the disappointed partner,
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell.
581
possibly after she rejected his advances in...
Textual Features
Rosamund Marriott Watson
The title poem, which first appeared in the January 1889 issue of Harper's Magazine, reworks the familiar swan-maiden story.
Hughes, Linda K. “’Fair <span data-tei-ns-tag="tei_title" data-tei-title-lvl=‘m’>Hymen</span> holdeth hid a world of woes’: Myth and Marriage in Poems by ’Graham R. Tomson’ (Rosamund Marriott Watson)”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
32
, No. 2, pp. 97-120.
101
This poem (largely about forced marriage, possession, and broken promises) is narrated by an...
Textual Production
Rosamund Marriott Watson
In 1894 RMW
(as Graham R. Tomson) published in the American Independent two articles about Thomas Hardy
, whom she had met in 1889.
Matthew, Henry Colin Gray et al., editors. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. http://www.oxforddnb.com/.
Leighton, Angela, and Margaret Reynolds, editors. Victorian Women Poets: An Anthology. Blackwell.
581
He may have used her a couple of years...
Textual Features
Rosamund Marriott Watson
In addition to poems from all her previous volumes, the book includes The Story of Marpessa, which first appeared in the Universal Review in September 1889. This poem is a critique of marriage adapted...
Dedications
Mary Webb
She had finished this book towards the end of the previous year, and dedicated it by permission to Thomas Hardy
.
Davies, Linda. Mary Webb Country. Palmers Press.
36
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...
Friends, Associates
Virginia Woolf
VW
and Leonard travelled to Dorchester to have tea at Max Gate with Thomas
and Florence Hardy
. Woolf met Hardy just this once, though, as Hermione Lee remarks, she had been reading and writing...
Family and Intimate relationships
Virginia Woolf
VW
's father, Sir Leslie Stephen
(1832-1904), was a Victorian philosopher and historian of ideas . . . literary historian and critic, and—perhaps most important—a biographer.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, pp. 32-56.
Rosenbaum, S. P. “An Educated Man’s Daughter: Leslie Stephen, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group”. Virginia Woolf: New Critical Essays, edited by Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy, Vision; Barnes and Noble, pp. 32-56.