Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
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.
The male protagonist, James Murdoch, an awkward and rough Lancashire factory owner, is considered by Gretchen Gerzina
to be an uncanny prefiguration of Thomas Hardy
's Henchard, Mayor of Casterbridge (in his novel of 1886).
Gerzina, Gretchen. Frances Hodgson Burnett. Chatto and Windus.
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Friends, Associates
Rhoda Broughton
RB
's vitality, sincerity, and pungent wit gained her the friendship of some of the most notable people of her day.
Stephen, Sir Leslie, and Sidney Lee, editors. The Dictionary of National Biography. Smith, Elder.
Her wide circle of friends and acquaintances included Henry James
(the two became extremely...
Intertextuality and Influence
Christine Brooke-Rose
This sets out to explore the effects of various technological media on the novel genre. It begins with the apparent forcible entry into a story by Jane Austen
of a great German contemporary of Austen:...
MB
credits British women novelists for modifying the methods of the great European novelists, noting in particular Dorothy Richardson
's perfection of the stream-of-consciousness technique. She draws a contrast between Dorothy Richardson
's Miriam and...
Intertextuality and Influence
Phyllis Bentley
The title, from Hardy
, carries connotations of blind, indifferent fate directing the course of human existence.
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...
Intertextuality and Influence
W. H. Auden
While an undergraduate at Oxford (from October 1925) he discovered T. S. Eliot
, and was for a while obsessively modernist, as he had previously been traditional in the style of Thomas Hardy
. He...
Education
Margaret Atwood
She attended elementary school, and then from 1952 Leaside High School
in Toronto, both in the Protestant public school system operating in Ontario alongside a Catholic one. She and her schoolmates got prayers and...
Textual Production
Lady Cynthia Asquith
LCA
's posthumous biographical study entitled Thomas Hardy
at Max Gate was her final work to see print.