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.
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, 2004.
84
Textual Features
John Oliver Hobbes
A number of critics note similarities between Hobbes's novel and Thomas Hardy
's Jude the Obscure. It is possible that the two friends discussed their novels, both of which began serial publication in December...
Textual Features
Philip Larkin
His selection was resolutely unfashionable, favouring Hardy
and Betjeman
at the expense of Eliot
and Pound
. He was, however, remarkably generous in his selection of women poets (often for just one or two poems...
Colles, Hester Janet. “A Gallery of Children”. Times Literary Supplement, No. 1245, 26 Nov. 1925, p. 804.
804
Sales in...
Textual Features
Louise Page
The story is of local interest. The eighteenth-century protagonist, Francis Herries, moves his family from Doncaster to a crumbling manor house in Borrowdale, home of a reputed witch. He also defies social rules by...
Textual Features
Alice Oswald
In a short introduction AO explains that her goal is the deep, slow process that put[s] our inner worlds in contact with the outer world. This process, she says, is dying out as repetitive physical...
Textual Features
Ada Leverson
In this novel Valentia Wyburn, another clever woman, has been five years married and has a lover (though their sexual relationship is never particularised) besides her husband. But she breaks with him when she discovers...
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 Hymen holdeth hid a world of woes: Myth and Marriage in Poems by Graham R. Tomson (Rosamund Marriott Watson)”. Victorian Poetry, Vol.
32
, No. 2, 1 June 1994– 2024, pp. 97-120.
101
This poem (largely about forced marriage, possession, and broken promises) is narrated by an...
Textual Features
Elizabeth Daryush
She opens and closes the collection with two poems printed in italics. Her list of titles provides their opening words: an unnumbered poem placed before number one (from the first Verses) and another unnumbered...
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...
Textual Features
Laetitia-Matilda Hawkins
With this novel LMH
perfected her sagely meditative narratorial voice (which looks forward to George Eliot
and Thomas Hardy
). She chose a plot of many characters and complicated interlocking machinations. Her initially unappealing heroine...
Textual Features
Martin Ross
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...
Textual Production
Elizabeth Jolley
EJ
invoked as an appropriate description of her own motivation, Flaubert
's dictum that writing comes from an inner wound.
Joussen, Ulla. “An Interview with Elizabeth Jolley”. Kunapipi, Vol.
15
, No. 2, 1993, pp. 37-43.
40
She said of Johnson
's Rasselas and Goethe
's Elective Affinities (both of which...
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...
