The Ashgate Research Companion to Thomas Hardy (review)

Thomas Hardy is getting up in the world. He is here the subject of a very handsomely produced book full of distinguished critical essays and very companionable scholarly resources. The editor, a distinguished Hardy scholar and critic herself, has created a work that in both conception and execution achieves what its title implies: a "comprehensive and authoritative state-of-the-art review of current scholarship" in particular areas of Hardy studies (12). There will always be some unevenness in a collaborative enterprise such as this, but the standard of practical guidance and critical illumination is for the most part very high. This is a book of over six hundred pages, twenty-eight essays, and twenty-nine illustrations. (My favorite of the latter is J. A. Pasquier's vertigo-inducing picture of the cliff-walk in A Pair of Blue Eyes [1872-73]. No wonder Knight slipped.) The essays are grouped in eight categories, all of them reflective of recurring emphases in Hardy studies during recent decades. Not all the categories are sufficiently supplied. "Historical and Cultural Context," for example, seems underserved with three fairly specialized essays.

Other sections pick up the slack, for example the rewarding discussions by Timothy Hands on Hardy's religious beliefs, Kevin Padian on "Evolution and Deep Time," and Andrew Radford on "Hardy and Scientific Humanism." Radford proposes that the Wessex novels can be read as narratives that assimilate and recreate "the 'proceedings' of the new sciences of humankind that evolved during the nineteenth century" (262). His point is well illustrated in Suzanne Keen's "Psychological Approaches to Thomas Hardy." Somewhat oddly—but perhaps wisely—the book foregoes an essay on the vexed question of Hardy's politics.

It is also surprising that no single essay confronts Hardy's many experiments in narrative form, surely a hallmark of his novelistic career. Important aspects of his actual practice are discussed in superb essays by Richard Nemesvari on melodrama and by Dale Kramer on Hardy's incorporation and modification of tragic modes and themes in his novels. Nemesvari very astutely links Hardy's "version of the melodramatic mode" to his exploration of "modern states of uncertainty [and] constant flux" (83). Kramer, while perceptively reviewing a broad array of modern critical discourses on the nature of tragedy, stresses the extent to which the chameleon Hardy "is a master of the mixed genre" (384). The angle of pursuit in both of these essays (and in a number of others as well) leads to productive analyses of narrative form in Hardy's work. But the main road is not taken. Perhaps it should not be in a book whose aim is more to consolidate knowledge than to forge new trails.

Nevertheless some very welcome widenings of familiar paths can be found in The Ashgate Research Companion. Rosemarie Morgan and Scott Rode in their essay on "The Evolution of Wessex" identify, with help from Heather Hawkins, Hardy's first recorded naming of Wessex in the subtitle of a poem written in 1866. This valuable essay casts a Bakhtinian eye on the roads and pathways that are usually woven into the fabric of Hardy's narratives. For good measure, it returns to Raymond Williams's characterization of Wessex as a border country situated between custom and enlightenment, labor and thought, rootedness and change. Suzanne J. Flynn surveys to good effect "the personal and cultural transitions that affected Hardy during the final years of his prose-writing career and his early years as a published poet" (88). She identifies in this period a cluster of personal developments that both bore on Hardy's alienations and freed him to explore new literary territory. The essay gives some due prominence to Hardy's interest in Walter Pater. William A. Davis throws light on the legal issues that are often generated in Hardy's novels by marriage and sexual relations. He begins his essay "Hardy and the Law: Sexual Relations and 'Matrimonial Divergence'" by reminding readers that Hardy...