A Glimpse of Hardy

268 life. But what a miserable existence Hardy provided her: jealously possessive of her time, circumscribing her activities, traveling with her primarily to visit scenes associated with Emma, and writing, writing, writing about his love affair with his first wife, an affair that Florence knew had died in misery many long years before. Gittings is understanding of all the pressures that operated on Florence, but I think it is fair to say that he reserves most of his tenderness for Emma. After all, Florence, who detested Emma's memory, was one of the prime sources of the rumor that Emma' s mind had turned, and this is precisely the rumor that Gittings is attempting to scotch. The publication of Thomas Hardy's Later Years is an event, and by far the most provocative biography of Hardy in print. It is not neutral, and it is not reassuring about Hardy's wholeness of spirit or basic humanity. Its emphasis on Hardy's romantic interest in all kinds of women may strike some readers (it did me) as excessive, and printing pictures of some of them four to a page seems to distort the total treatment. On the other hand, there is the fact of Hardy's unseemly interest (at the age of 82!) in Mrs. Gertrude Bugler, a young actress who was appearing in a dramatized Tess, that provoked a jealous fit in Florence, and Hardy did think of himself as a ladies' man. The book is beautifully written; Gittings has a very real sense of style, though some observations are made more than once. It is difficult to see how any future biographer or critic of Thomas Hardy can ignore its interpretation of a writer we once took for granted as someone we thought we knew all about. REVIEWS 1. A Glimpse of Hardy Butler, Lance St. John. Thomas Hardy [British Authors Introductory Critical Studies] (Lond, NY: Cambridge ^JP, 1978). Cloth: $16.95; paper: $5-95. Butler's book, designed as a general introduction to Hardy's works, deals mainly with the author's six most renowned novels, Far from the Madding Crowd. The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders. Tess of the D'Urbervilles. and Jude the Obscure. The author comments on five or six features of these novels. In his chapter on The Mayor of Casterbridge, for example, he discusses the plot, the tragic tendency, the biblical allusions, the time structure, the climax of the novel, and Elizabeth Jane. In most chapters several pages are given to an unnecessary synopsis of the plot of the novel. It takes ten tedious pages, for example, to tell the story of Tess of the D'Urbervilles from four different points of view: Tess as a love story, Tess as a pastoral romance, Tess as an allegory (Tess as "Everywoman in flesh and blood," p. 101), Tess as a "picture of some of the currents of belief and disbelief that coexisted in Britain towards the end of the nineteenth century" (p. 104). 269 Lance St. John Butler emphasizes Hardy's importance as, a poet (pp. 3. l6l) but does not hesitate to devote only eighteen feeble pages to the poetry. In a superficial way he writes on "Hardy's Love Poetry," "Nature in Hardy's Poetry," and "Hardy's negative metaphysics." Butler completely fails to take Hardy's short stories seriously. In his chapter on "The Minor Fiction" he gives a brief sketch of some stories just "to show the relationship they bear to the novels" (p. 159)· Very often the author's tone resembles that of the tea-table talker or the class room philosopher (e.g., "So the world goes," "Among all creatures man alone has a view of the possible," "We sow the seeds of our own disasters") Butler's unsatisfactory book ends in a strange and inept reading list. In this "small selection from the great mass of critical and biographical work concerned with Hardy" (p. 181) the major works (the bibliographies by Purdy, Weber, Gerber and Davis; the handbook and commentary on Hardy's poetry by J. 0. Bailey; The Literary Notes of Thomas Hardy by Lennart A. Bjork) are not mentioned. Universit...