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BOOK REVIEWS in the many intriguing anecdotes about Blackwood garnered by Ashley from a plethora of sources. However, like a house lived in for so long, Ashley 's text is a little cluttered. We probably do not need to know the subsequent history of the houses Blackwood's family lived in, details of the Horlick's Magazine (since Blackwood didn't contribute to it), or the subsequent career and interests of Alexander Keiller, a man Blackwood worked with briefly during World War One and had no further contact with. Ashley would have served his readers better by probing more deeply into Blackwood's psychology, including his strong, lifelong sense of guilt, sensitivity to loss, depressions, search for surrogate parents, and his sexuality. A discussion of the complexities of his motivation for storytelling, and in particular the role of his illness in New York, during which he conceived ideas for stories, would also have been useful. Nevertheless, Ashley has written a fascinating and readable account of a fascinating man. Ashley recounts that Blackwood loved the camera obscura because he could remain hidden but view the world. While some aspects of Blackwood's life will likely remain hidden, Ashley has given us a colorful perspective on him. It is one which will prove essential in reassessing his work—the best record of his view on the world—in relation to the mainstream of modern literature contemporary to him. Blackwood's stories and novels are informed by an eclectic array of discourses, which occasionally obtrude, but most often he carries the reader along on his flights of poetic fancy into uncanny worlds. Stephen Graham wrote that Blackwood "had a rapid power of imagination and could tell a haunting original story at the drop of a hat"; his brilliance as a storyteller will continue to attract readers and critical commentary. George Johnson ______________ University College of Cariboo Hardy's Novels Norman Page. Thomas Hardy: The Novels. New York: Palgrave, 2001. xviii + 199 pp. Cloth $59.95 Paper $19.95 THE LATEST in the Palgrave series Analysing Texts, Norman Page's Thomas Hardy: The Novels is a close study of various passages from four of Hardy's major works: The Mayor of Casterbridge, Far From the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. The book is an excellent pedagogical tool for both students of Hardy's novels and interested readers. Page focuses on the art of close reading; by paying careful attention to Hardy's language and imagery in selected 199 ELT 46 : 2 2003 short passages, he illuminates some of the chief narrative and thematic concerns in the novels. Thomas Hardy is in fact as much a book about how to perform a close reading of a passage as it is about the passages themselves. Page subtly argues that Hardy is a novelist who, like Jane Austen or Henry James, particularly calls for close analyses of his texts. While some of his analyses seem a bit truncated, one keeps in mind that Page intends these readings to be the beginning of a fuller analysis of Hardy's novels; to that end, he includes suggestions for other passages to read closely at the end of each section. Page divides his passage analyses into six sections: Hardy's narrators , beginnings and endings in the novels, the role of nature, the relationship between individuals to their communities, the struggle between tradition and change, and the relationship between men and women. In the first section entitled "Writer and Reader," Page discusses both the use of narration in the novels and the role of the literary marketplace in Hardy's creation of his works. Page argues that each novel represents a compromise Hardy reached between his personal ambitions for his art and the demands of the marketplace. In a recurring anecdote in the book, Page describes Cornhill Magazine editor Leslie Stephen attempting to "soften" Troy's seduction of Fanny in Far From the Madding Crowd, as well as Stephen's remark about his "concession to public stupidity." In addition, Page describes the implied (whom he claims is close to the actual) reader of Hardy's novels: bourgeois, educated and possessing a good deal of cultural...

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