Studies of Two Hardy Novels

BOOK REVIEWS potential was not perceived by practically anyone else for many years; the years about which we have relatively limited information (18621867 , when he lived in London, and for that matter 1868, when he was working on the manuscript of The Poor Man and the Lady); the tug of war between Hardy's grim awareness of the social and economic class into which he had been born and his growing pleasure in being accepted by wealthy or titled individuals; the reasons for his wary, and occasionally bitter, relationship to reviewers; his complex feelings about the novel genre, which varied almost from year to year; his changing attitudes toward The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon , which earned him, more than any other single work, the Order of Merit and the admiration of younger poets; and the gloom and exhaustion that overtook him in his final fifteen years. Perhaps we know as much as we can ever know about Hardy's relationships to Tryphena, Emma, Florence, and all those other women who (to our dismay) turn up, four photos to a page, in Gittings's biography; but we would like to know more about the quality as well as the range of Hardy's intellectual concerns. How much of Hardy's thinking was derived from the writings of his contemporaries, from Victorian science, from Continental philosophy, and how much from the Old Testament and from readings in classical literature? And just what did Hardy do to his sources to make it new? Even if there are no final answers to such questions, the publication of Pinion's Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends makes it possible to venture on several new and exciting speculations. Harold Orel ______________ University of Kansas Studies of Two Hardy Novels Dale Kramer. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the d'Urbervilles. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991. xviii + 109 pp. Cloth $27.95 Paper $10.95 Gary Adehnan. Jude the Obscure: A Paradise of Despair. New York: Twayne, 1992. XX + 137 pp. Cloth $22.95 Paper $7.95 ALTHOUGH THE PRACTICAL publishing goals behind them are not exactly the same—nor are the in-house norms imposed upon their contributors—the Twayne Masterwork Studies series and the Cambridge University Press Landmarks of World Literature series nevertheless share a similar laudable objective: to offer a scholar the 489 ELT 36:4 1993 opportunity to provide a compact book-length assessment of one of a major writer's best-known works—an assessment thoroughly informed by previous scholarship and, at the same time, the product of solid and judicious original criticism. Two recent studies, one of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (Cambridge) by Dale Kramer and the other of Jude the Obscure (Twayne) by Gary Adelman, meet those objectives with different degrees of success. Dale Kramer's study of Tess provides parallel chronologies of events in Hardy's life, in the literary world, and in history; discussions of the social and backgrounds to Tess; a series of extended chapters devoted to "character," "plot," and "tragedy" respectively; a survey of the immediate critical reaction to and subsequent influence of Tess; and an annotated guide to sources consulted. Probably the one truly regrettable omission in Kramer's study is an index, for Kramer's book is far more than a textbook: despite space limitations and the need to explain even elementary critical terminology , both imposed by the series format, it is a judicious and discriminating scholarly study of Tess. Kramer's discussion of the backgrounds to Tess, for example, provides a wealth of detail about Hardy's construction of "Wessex" and relevant social conditions in Dorset; his consideration of literary influences on Tess, though necessarily (and admittedly) speculative, is marked everywhere by informed, perceptive judgment; his assessment of the critical reception and subsequent influence of the novel is a model of circumspection and nice discrimination. And so is Kramer's consideration of Tess under such broad rubrics as "character" and "tragedy." His discussion of the novel as tragedy, for example, moves confidently through a survey of Victorian attitudes toward tragedy and offers strikingly apt comparisons of Hardy's practice as a tragic novelist with the theoretical considerations of...