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ne REVIEWS 1 . A Cache of Hardy THOMAS HARDY'S PERSONAL WRITINGS: PREFACES, LITERARY OPINIONS, REMINISCENCES. Ed. Harold Orel, Lawrence: University of Kansas P. 1366, $6.00. Mr. Orel, who har previously published a book on the epic aspects of THE DYNASTS, here provides the best and most useful collection of Hardy's non-fiction, much of it long buried in relatively obscure publications. This volume is particularly useful because it brings together in one piace not only the prefaces Hardy wrote for his own novels, but also prefaces he wrote for books by others, and various previously uncollected occasional pieces Mr. Orel has sensibly not printed in full every snippet listed and described in Purdy's THOMAS HARDY: A BIBLIOGRAPHICAL STUDY, Part III, although in an Appendix Orel provides a list of these minor writings and brief annotations. The value of the volume is further increased by Orel's useful notes on the texts of his inclusions and by an excellent Ã-ndex. Although Ernest Brennecke's LIFE AND ART (New York, 1925) is no longer "out of print" (it was reprinted by Haskell House), Orel's volume includes the i terns in Brem.ecke and much more. It is a volume Hardy scholars wl l'i be pleased to have on their shelves, Purdue University —H, E. Gerber 2· Hardy's New Look Roy Morreil, THOMAS HARDY: THE WILL AND THE WAY, Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya P, 1965; distributed NY: Oxford U P, 1966. $6.50, Mr. Morrell's ¡eally quite original book of essays when set against the predominant Hardy criticism might have been subtitled "The Other Thomas Hardy," The view of Hardy Mr, Morreil supports is not the view of major Hardy critics, both sympathetic and otherwise, over the years. Vie h^ve been reading our Hardy through the critics darkly rather than through Hardy himself lucidly. Morreil does not quake before the ogre critics have made of an author:s statements of intention, nor is he misled by the silly interpretations of D, H. Lawrence s flamboyant statement that "An artist is usually a damned liar - , " In the fiction the artist is no doubt often a "liar," but '.η his theoretical comments, In his statements of intention, he is not necessarily a greater liar than the critics who carefully select the image patterns which will support their case» Morreil, with due respect to John Holloway's intelligence and frequent brilliant insights, takes Holloway as his chief example of one kind of critic who has misread Hardy, Morreil is to be. commended for challenging one of the best of the second (?) generation of "new critics," despite some of Holloway's qualifications and misgivings, In the main, what Morreil insists on is reading the writer's language in context, the context of the whole text, of the writer's known experience and sources, of the writer's time, and so on. Read this way, Morreil believes, Hardy will appear in a new light and much of the doom and gloom Hardy legend will be dissipated. There is in Hardy "a genuine joy in human contacts"; Hardy was not ...

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