The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (review)

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer; pp. xxvi + 231. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999, £38.84, £13.95 paper, $54.95, $19.95 paper.

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy, edited by Dale Kramer, is a recent addition to the genre of collections of critical essays, a genre in Hardy studies that includes Phillip Mallett's The Achievement of Thomas Hardy (2000), Charles P. C. Pettit's Reading Thomas Hardy (1998) and New Perspectives on Thomas Hardy (1994), Harold Orel's Critical Essays on Thomas Hardy's Poetry (1995), Margaret Higonnet's The Sense of Sex (1993), and Lance St. John Butler's Alternative Hardy (1989). One turns, however, to a collection of essays that have been commissioned and gathered under the rubric of "companion" with a different set of readerly expectations, anticipating a kind of congenial, perhaps not provocative, guide to an author. Kramer acknowledges this, and in his Preface to the volume he notes that "a Companion can reveal to both first-time and more advanced readers the benefits to be gained from readings founded on a canvass of previous commentary and ambitious to stimulate curiosity and to expand current knowledge" (xv). In its coverage of Hardy's life and works, its overviews of critical and theoretical approaches, and its treatment of selected topics (gender, genre, aesthetics), the twelve essays published in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy not only perform that more utilitarian service of the "literary companion" but frequently inform and challenge that more "advanced" reader.

Kramer has distributed the essays across categories that nicely take up "Thomas Hardy." Several authors range authoritatively and widely among Hardy's writings in essays that focus on topics ("Wessex," "Art and Aesthetics," "Religion, Science, and Philosophy"). Two address critical history ("Hardy and Critical Theory," "Hardy and Matters of Gender"). Still others explore broad concepts by focusing on specified texts ("Variants on Genre: The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Hand of Ethelberta"; "The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders"; "The Radical Aesthetic of Tess of the d'Urbervilles"). Discussion of the poetry has been moving into the foreground of Hardy studies, and the Companion reflects that critical direction by closing with two essays devoted to the poems, "Hardy as a Nineteenth-Century Poet" and "The Modernity of Thomas Hardy's Poetry."

Michael Millgate's opening essay on the biographical sources provides a compressed guide to locating that material and furnishes some telling observations about the relationship between the life and work by the biographer who, having spent decades among those materials, reminds us that "the central events in the lives of creative figures, their acts of creativity, are precisely those most resistant to exploration and explication" (16). In a very interesting essay, "Wessex," Simon Gatrell carefully examines the novels' prefaces and publication and compositional histories, in order to date Hardy's conceptualization of the novels as a coherently patterned "Wessex series" as "nearer [to] 1896 than 1870 [. . .] [although] no one reading the novels in the collected edition would have been able to draw such a conclusion" (30). For those advanced readers who know Gatrell's work, "Wessex" offers a fine distillation, and for those first-time and/or student readers, the essay opens a window onto "Hardy the creator" and forcefully justifies the enterprise of textual history.

Contributions to the volume by Kristin Brady and Peter Widdowson survey, energetically and engagingly, the courses of critical and theoretical responses to Hardy's fiction and poetry. Brady's focus is "matters of gender," and despite the modest claim that the essay is "only a schematic summary of [. . .] the most significant responses to representations of sexual difference in Hardy's texts" (93), this is a crisp and smart presentation of readings of gender moving from contemporary Victorian responses to some of the most recent discussions of Hardy that proceed out of queer theory. In his 1989 book, Hardy...