A Companion to Thomas Hardy (review)

Thomas Hardy had an unusually long and productive writing career, a career that encompassed achievements in two major areas of literature: prose fiction and poetry. This wide-ranging compilation of thirty new essays on Hardy’s life and work does a fine job of discussing Hardy’s accomplishments as both a novelist and a poet. Ably edited and introduced by Keith Wilson, this volume is part of the Blackwell Companion series of essay collections on literature. Wilson’s short introductory essay sounds one of the present collection’s unifying themes by drawing attention to the paradoxical nature of Hardy’s work. As Wilson points out, Hardy was a freethinker who cherished religious forms; he was a modernist who wrote within the tradition of nineteenth-century realism; he was a pessimist whose works have struck many as both life-affirming and humorous.

Many of the foremost names in Hardy scholarship are represented in this volume, which begins very strongly with an essay by the eminent Hardy biographer Michael Millgate on the difficulty of writing a biography of Thomas Hardy, despite and perhaps because of the fact that Hardy wrote his own biography and had it published posthumously and attributed to his widow. Here too is a paradox, because one might expect that having access to an autobiography written by the author himself would have made the task of the literary biographer that much easier. Not so, writes Millgate, and his reservations about the problematic nature of Hardy’s autobiography are echoed by all of the subsequent essays in the second and third sections of this book, which deal with the intellectual and sociocultural contexts of Hardy’s work. The essays in these two sections refer constantly and uneasily back to Hardy’s The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy. In fact, a biographical strain runs throughout the entire collection of essays, emerging even in those that analyze specific works in the Hardy canon. For instance, Mary Rimmer’s essay on the “Novels of Ingenuity” and Peter Widdowson’s essay on Hardy’s short stories are as much about the publication history of these fictions as they are about analyzing the fictions themselves. William W. Morgan’s contribution on scholarly editions of Hardy’s poems is similarly more concerned with bibliographic history than with an analysis of the poetry, although it follows a more analytical essay on the poetry itself by Tim Armstrong.

I do not mean to highlight this emphasis on the biographical as a criticism. Quite the contrary. This is an important focus, since Hardy’s constant battles with publishers over censorship led to changes in his texts and therefore complicate literary analysis of his work. Publication histories can also be very informative about literary trends and styles. But I was surprised at how frequently such information surfaces in the essays under review.

All the essays in this volume are of high quality, as might be expected from such an eminent list of contributors. Some, however, are more accessible than others, especially to readers who are not necessarily experts in the field of Hardy studies. This raises the question that occurs as well with other volumes in the Blackwell Companion series: namely, who is the intended audience? Some of the essays, such as George Levine’s on Hardy and Darwin, are clearly pitched at a readership that is already familiar with nineteenth-century evolutionary philosophy and not at the average undergraduate or the general reader. Similarly, William Greenslade’s essay on Hardy’s notebooks is clearly aimed at those whose interest in Hardy’s work methods is more than cursory. All the essays assume a familiarity with Hardy’s work and life. Some, however, are of more general interest, such as Simon Gatrell’s on Hardy’s use of dress in Far from the Madding Crowd and – surprisingly, because it is at first glance so theoretical – Richard Nemesvari’s fascinating rumination on Hardy’s mixing of genres.

In sum, this is an important collection. Not only is each essay...