Hardy Essays

BOOK REVIEWS quickly prior to submitting the typescript to his publisher, Unwin. As in the case of the first English and American editions, the 1921 collected editions published by Heinemann in England and Doubleday, Page in the United States offer substantially different editions of Conrad's first novel, primarily because of different typesettings, fonts, and bindings. Higdon and Eddleman have detected 440 variants (including over 100 substantives) between the first English edition and the 1921 collected editions. Furthermore, Conrad revised Almayer's Folly in 1916 for the Doubleday edition. In doing so he made many handwritten revisions in a copy of the first English edition. Though not published until almost 20 years after its original composition, the Author's Note has survived in five early forms: the manuscript (two and a half pages), two typescripts, and the Doubleday and Heinemann collected editions. In preparing the Cambridge Edition text of Almayer's Folly, the editors resisted the temptation to do a complete overhaul of punctuation and spelling. But they have adopted variants that, in the words of Higdon and Eddleman, represent "either Conrad's own revisions or corrections required within the context of the novel's transmission, Conrad's work on it, and the copy-text's own usage." Basing their presentation of the novel and the "Author's Note" on the available original documents, they offer eclectic texts that richly reward careful study by Conrad scholars. With some trepidation at the prospect of ending this review by stating the obvious, 1 nevertheless must say that this volume deserves to stand as a fine companion piece to the previously published Cambridge edition of The Secret Agent, edited by Bruce Harkness and S. W. Reid. Eddleman and Higdon have done their work well. Because of their painstaking labors, we now have the most definitive account possible of the artistic labor pains that led to the birth of a novelistic career. Indeed, it lives up to the boast made explicit in the final sentence of The Texts: The Cambridge Edition publishes for the first time the text of his first novel as Conrad created it in 1895." Hence, Almayer's Folly remains a provocative literary document, both for the psychologically compelling story it tells and the artistic story it foretells. Ted Billy ________________ Saint Mary's College Hardy Essays Phillip V. Mallett and Ronald P. Draper, eds. A Spacwus Vision: Essays on Hardy. Newmill: Patten Press, 1994. iv + 149 pp. £19.95 241 ELT 39:2 1996 A SPACIOUS VISION: Essays on Hardy is a varied, interestingly arranged gathering of essays and poems dedicated to Jim Gibson, teacher, mentor, and friend to many, many students of Thomas Hardy, the present reviewer happily among them. In addition to poems by Anthony Thwaite (for Gibson), John Powell Ward, and Simon Curtis, we have, among others, such Hardy luminaries as Michael Millgate (on the disposition of the Max Gate Library), Dennis Taylor (on "Hardy's fascination with the printed page"), J. B. Bullen (on the ever-intriguing Well-Beloved), Bob Schweik (on Jude the Obscure) and Rosemarie Morgan (on the "maternal" mode of Hardy's imagination). And Mallett and Draper have themselves made substantial contributions. Several familiar themes recur: Hardy's modernity (Schweik, Sumner, and Draper); Hardy's artistry (Mallett, Bullen, Taylor); and Hardy's inscrutability as thinker and person (Mallett, Curtis, Ward). The "spacious vision" of the title is something to be inferred one supposes; it is nowhere fully defined. There is nothing here to trouble seriously the placid waters of pre-1970s approaches to Hardy—nothing, to borrow from Simon Curtis's wicked little poem "Colleague," on the order of "Metadiegatic discourse," or "work... due out soon/ On Methuen Video," or "Archaic bourgeois structures" dictating a "bourgeois text." And certainly, certainly, no suggestion via Barthes or Foucault that '"The author is dead,'" deposed by our colleagues Michael, Dennis, Robert, or Rosemarie. Thomas Hardy author was, is, very much alive in this volume. No Subject, no Author-Function, no Scriptor he, though one must wonder if Hardy did not at times contemplate the working of the Immanent will through the quill in his hand. As befits a dedicatory volume, nothing unseemly. Perhaps for this reason...