Hardy’s Last Letters

Thomas Hardy craved attention for his work but dreaded self-exposure and was wary of close personal contact. Such desire to keep public focus on the work and away from the life is not unusual for a writer, but for Hardy it was nearly pathological. He routinely burned various papers, documents, manuscripts, and correspondence, hoping to limit what was known about his private world. He wrote a 600–page, two-volume autobiography, The Life of Thomas Hardy, that was published under his wife’s name, a self-ghostwritten biography that left out key events and people and years he preferred that no one knew about. Withdrawn and guarded, he built a house screened by a brick wall and thousands of trees, and spent as much time as he could there, ensconced in his study. He did not have a telephone in his home until 1919, when he was seventy-nine.

He did write many letters. Letters were an ideal way for Hardy to manage interaction with the outside world. Between 1978 and 1988, seven thick volumes of Hardy’s collected letters were published. In their preface to the seventh volume the editors declared it the final one, and the book certainly had a final feel to it: the bulk of its contents covered the last two years of Hardy’s life and was accompanied by a miscellaneous assortment of nearly a hundred earlier letters that had surfaced over the years since the project began.

No one anticipated or imagined an eighth collection. But now, a quarter century after the previous “final” volume appeared, Michael Millgate and Keith Wilson have assembled what they call “the edition’s second final volume.” During the intervening years since 1988, “both scholarly and popular interest in Thomas Hardy have, if anything, intensified, and enough ‘new’ letters have emerged to justify and indeed require the preparation and publication of this eighth volume.”

Reading this new assemblage, these “accidents of discovery,” it is tempting to say that few readers still would imagine the need for this eighth volume. The vast majority of the letters are Hardy’s brief pro forma responses declining invitations to be interviewed or visited, to pose for photographers or painters, to contribute prefaces or introductions or blurbs or testimonials or work for anthologies, to autograph books, to receive visitors or sign petitions or join organizations or attend meetings. Hardy’s stout defensive maneuvers included excuses about his health, his hearing, his eyesight, his age, his memory, as well as his voluminous correspondence and other demands on his time. The book could have been titled Leave Me Alone!

Even when Hardy writes for purposes other than turning down invitations, his message is usually terse. There is a letter from Hardy to his aural surgeon that reads, in its entirety, “Many thanks for letter—You will excuse this brevity. Kind regards.” There is a two-sentence letter from Hardy thanking his solicitor for notifying an incompetent plumber that a toilet still did not flush properly. There is a postcard to the president of the Pennsylvania Dental Society whose three-word message is “As thou wishest,” a communiqué that even baffles the book’s editors but is probably nothing more than the transmission of an autograph. Some of the letters are written and signed on Hardy’s behalf by his wife or typist, having been taken from drafts; some are extracts taken from booksellers’ and auctioneers’ catalogues. We are dealing primarily with scrapings from the epistolary barrel.

Such material is most likely of interest only to Hardy scholars and the most dedicated of his readers—especially at $160 a copy. But there are some letters that an interested general reader will be glad to encounter that let us glimpse the man in slightly less guarded or perfunctory circumstances. Hardy, so dour and formulaic in letter after letter, shifts course to tell Lady Cynthia Asquith this: “Wessex our dog has learnt to listen in at the wireless which we have been...