Hardy's Cornish Romance

142 2. Hardy's Cornish Romance Kenneth Phelps. The Wormwood Cup: Thomas Hardy in Cornwall (Padstow, Cornwall, England» Lodenek P, 1975). £3·75· A Pair of Blue Eves (I873) was Thomas Hardy's third novel to be published. That it echoes in many ways his meeting Emma Gifford in Cornwall and his courtship of her is well known. (This is not to deny that Blue Eyes is fiction. Emma did not, like Elfride Swancourt, die; she married Hardy.) The Wormwood Cup points out that many of Hardy's attitudes and adventures in Blue Eyes were based on fact, but it also points out that Hardy's love-poems more than his novel tell the true story. In poem after poem, Mr. Phelps identifies the facts on which the poems rest. A basic value in The VJormwood Cup is that it can help Hardy's readers separate the facts of his courtship from the fiction of Blue Eyes. Dozens of Hardy's poems, in whole or in part, treat his courtship in Cornwall, his marriage to Emma, and facts in their married life that are only touched upon in Hardy's autobiography (published as by his second wife, Florence). The Wormwood Cup meditates the effects upon Hardy of the romantic scenes of Cornwall : its quaint villages, meandering streams, old churches, and cliff-surrounded bays. In interpreting these scenes, the book seems to make use of every detail known of Hardy's courtship. Though of course Mr. Phelps was not present to overhear the lovers' talk, his surmises, drawn from letters, newspaper sources, village gossip, places visited, etc. have the ring of truth. Besides the poems of courtship, Phelps discusses various later poems in which Hardy meditated the actualities of his marriage to Emma. He finds echoes of Hardy's most intimate feelings about Emma in portraits of various women, from Elfride Swancourt of Blue Eyes to Sue Bridehead of Jude. He points out that many poems written after Hardy married Emma suggest disillusionment in such items as Hardy's introspective dreaming and idealizations and Emma's tendency toward snobbishness. Among other interesting interpretations, Mr. Phelps suggests that Hardy's The Queen of Cornwall is a cryptic allegory in which Tristram stands for Hardy, and the two Iseults of the legend for Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale. The Wormwood Cup contains twenty-two full-page pictures; some photographs and some drawings by Hardv or Emma. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill J. 0. Bailey 3. Bennett in the "Evening Standard" Arnold Bennetti The Evening Standard Years. Books and Persons I926-I93I. ed with an Introduction by Andrew Mylett (Londι Chatto & Windus» Hamden, Conn» Archon Books, 1974). $6.50. ...