Miscellaneous Book Notices

38 Now Hardy is a man of far less intellectual vigor than Meredith. Born a peasant, he yet retains much of the peasant's views of life. He evidently does not read very much, and I grieve to find that he is drawn into merely fashionable society, talk of lords and ladies more than of ordinary people. Most unfortunately he has a very foolish wife--a woman of higher birth than his own, who looks down upon him, and is utterly discontented . ... I admire Hardy's best work very highly, but in the man himself I feel disappointed. To my great surprise, I found that he did not know the names of flowers in his own fields. Such paragraphs are valuable reflections of Gissing's own literary and social principles and are particularly ironic in light of his unfortunate marriages. Visits with Hardy, Meredith, Conrad and James (it is regrettable that these letters contain nothing about the latter two novelists) were rare occasions for Gissing, and though he treasured them he was never in a position to engage in much social intercourse. He dearly wished for recognition ("I cannot stand obscurity"), but he remained a lonely man often dependent on Bertz for relief ("I shall, as before, be very anxious to have a word from you in my lonely wandering. Yes, lonely indeed. I suffer more and more from solitude"). In editing the Gissing-Bertz letters, Professor Young performs his tasks judiciously. There is no whimpering about Gissing's hardships, no reluctance to investigate the obscure, and no hesitation to provide literary opinions of his own. Hardly a reference escapes his annotation. An admirer of Gissing for the right reasons, Professor Young is highly qualified to prepare Gissing's diary and other letters from the Yale University and the New York Public libraries for publication. Loyola University, Chicago Joseph J. Wolff MISCELLANEOUS BOOK NOTICES 1. W. W. Norton & Co. shows an especially admirable idealism in publishing in its fine paperback series all three volumes of Henry Handel Richardson's THE FORTUNES OF RICHARD MAHONY (AUSTRALIA FELIX, THE WAY HOME, and ULTIMA THULE). The three volumes deserve to be kept in print, as, at least, MAURICE GUEST should also be kept in print. In attempting to encourage critics and research scholars to have another look at H. H. Richardson's work, Professor Verna Wittrock is now preparing an annotated bibliography of writings about Richardson for publication in a future number of EFT. Certainly, the Norton reprints have made the task of reappraisal much easier. 2. Prentice-Hall's Twentieth Century Views series does not yet include volumes specifically related to the EFT period, but this series deserves to be called to the attention of all teachers. Each volume in this series contains a selection of outstanding critical and appreciative essays on a single author. The quality 39 of the contents is on the whole high. There is, in addition, a chronology of important dates, a selected bibliography, and an editor's introduction in each volume. These make useful anthologies of criticism on major figures like Fielding, Hemingway, Thoreau, Whitman, Proust, Frost, Camus, Eliot, and others. 3. Along similar lines as the Prentice-Hall series is D. C. Heath's Discussions of Literature. This series, however, also includes a few titles on the genres: THE NOVEL, edited by Roger Sale, and POETRY: RHYTHM AND SOUND, edited by George Hemphill, The various volumes in the series strike me as a little more uneven than those in the Prent ice-Hal i series, but D. C. Heath reaches back to THE CANTERBURY TALES, THE DIVINE COMEDY, and HAMLET, and it includes titles on the genres. Insofar as the titles on specific novelists are concerned, my own feeling is that there is too much emphasis on general appreciations and that the novels which have in recent times been given the most serious attention are not sufficiently represented. Thus, in the Dickens title, there is proportionately too little on BLEAK HOUSE and in the George Eliot title proportionately too little on MIDDLEMARCH. On the other hand, this series does often include some fine early appreciations, such as three essays by Henry James on George Eliot. — H. E...