Thomas Hardy

Once in a blue moon a groundbreaking work arrives on the Hardy horizon blazing an open, unending trail. One such work is Albert Guérard’s Thomas Hardy: the Novels and Stories (1949, rev. edn., 1964), still active and still in circulation today. Another would be J. Hillis Miller’s Thomas Hardy: Distance and Desire (1970), and more recently Gillian Beer’s Darwin’s Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (1983, repr, 2009). Dale Kramer’s Thomas Hardy: The Forms of Tragedy (1975) is yet another contender with his edited collections still having a foothold—notably his Critical Approaches to the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (1979) and The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (1999).

Not only does every single one of these trailblazers enter the 21st century but also advances into a new, pathbreaking field of scholarship as does Suzanne Keen’s Thomas Hardy’s Brains: Psychology, Neurology, and Hardy’s Imagination (Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 2014).

It is true that as early as 1883 Hardy was defined as a psychologist by the renowned physician-sexologist Havelock Ellis, who hailed him as “a psychologist who is also an artist.” And, more recently, from Albert Guérard, who describes Hardy’s protagonists as “neurotic voyagers” or “impotent spectators” (Guérard, 1949), to Rosemary Sumner (1981) and Claire Tomalin (2006), psychoanalytic terms derived from Freudian diagnostic schemas have been applied to Hardy’s work. Keen, however, is not content to rest with mere schemas. Thomas Hardy’s Brains, which travels an immense distance over time and space and maps a detailed course of scientific observation and sociological investigation every inch of the way, is nothing less than a mammoth diagnostic expedition.

Rarely losing sight of Ellis, whose own publications on matters ranging from medical science to eugenics approached 50 volumes and whose Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1897–1928) alone numbered six volumes, Keen covers as much contemporary material as Hardy, during his long lifetime, almost certainly encountered, whether by total immersion, critique, or reputation. Keen leaves no stone unturned. She breaks new ground at every venture into sidetracks and avenues Hardy might well have explored if only in the convivial society of the London clubland where we know he kept elite, professional company. In brief, to name but a few, at the Savile Club he would have met F. H. W Myers, founder of the Society for Psychical Research; at the Athenaeum scientists such as the naturalist George James Allman, the physician George Fielding Blandford, the linguist Thomas Spencer Baynes as well as leading surgeons of the day and, later (as recorded in the Life), the renowned James Crichton Browne (medical psychiatrist) and the neurologist Henry Mead who remained a lifelong devotee of Hardy’s poetry.

Nor does Keen lose sight of relevant areas already researched and documented. With a lightness of touch that neither burdens the reader with elaborate directional markers nor jars the rhythmic ease of her narrative momentum, she gestures at landmarks here, signposts there, voices everywhere, allowing signifiers an autonomy free of glib assumptions or any implication that historical context can be reduced to its lowest common denominator—“that is the way things were.” On the contrary, Thomas Hardy’s Brains steadfastly points to inconsonant, variable background sources delivered in the unassuming voice of a messenger:

Influence studies document Hardy’s magpie gatherings of ideas, with some strands standing out: his agnosticism, his Darwinism, and his early interest in the systems of Charles Fourier and Comte’s Positivism. Hardy denied he was a pessimist, preferring the label “evolutionary meliorist” (“Preface,” LLv.2, 319); he also insisted that he was not a Positivist (Letters v.3, 53) though he certainly knew Comte’s work. He was of no one school. The separate impact of John Stuart Mill, Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, Charles Fourier, as well as Auguste Comte have frequently been noted by Hardy critics.

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Keen’s deftness in balancing the bright pieces in the magpie’s nest reflects a consideration for readers and allows for the exercise of their own discerning vision. For instance, Hardy may show an early interest in...