How to Write Like a Bestselling Author by Tony Rossiter

Author:Tony Rossiter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Summersdale Publishers Ltd
Published: 2017-07-28T00:00:00+00:00

In The Woodlanders (1887) he sets the scene by melding the landscape with the human drama that is to follow:

It was one of those sequestered spots outside the gates of the world… where, from time to time, dramas of a grandeur and unity truly Sophoclean are enacted in the real, by virtue of the concentrated passions and closely knit interdependence of the lives therein.

Character

Hardy had an acute sense of drama; and the heroes and heroines of his major novels are some of the most compelling and dramatic characters in all literature. Henchard, Tess and Jude, in particular, are magnificently conceived, brilliantly portrayed, unforgettable figures who dominate their stories.

The Mayor of Casterbridge is Hardy’s most powerful study of character and destiny. Although some incidents in the novel strain credibility, Henchard leaps off the page. He is an extraordinary creation, full of contradictions: strong, ignorant, energetic, uneducated, driven, lovable, self-destructive, depressive, volatile, bad-tempered. He craves affection, but has an explosive temperament that drives it away.

Tess, on the other hand, is an innocent whose downfall is brought about not by her own character but by the society in which she lives. By giving the novel the deliberately provocative subtitle A Pure Woman, Hardy made his own position clear and waved a red rag in the face of conventional views. Tess was condemned by society as a fallen woman, a kept mistress and finally a murderess; but for Hardy she was pure of heart, with all the virtues of charity. With a plot that revolves around rape, illegitimate birth and adultery against a background of rural spoliation, Tess attacked Christian hypocrisy, Victorian double standards and the exploitation of cheap labour, and it provoked a furious reaction. Always ready to adapt his writing to the demands of the market, Hardy produced a heavily cut and changed text for serialisation in The Graphic, for which he removed anything likely to offend its Christian readers. Tess was written, revised, cut, restored and revised again before the final, complete version was published in November 1891.

Bitter at his own failure to attend university, in Jude the Obscure Hardy hits out at the class system’s denial of education and opportunity to the intelligent poor, and the resultant wastage of human resources and talent. The novels which most critics regard as Hardy’s masterpieces ( The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure) are generally sad stories with bleak (but somehow inevitable) endings. Jude, the most unremittingly gloomy, was savaged by the critics as ‘a shameful nightmare’ and ‘Jude the Obscene’. But there was also praise for ‘the most powerful and moving picture of human life which Mr Hardy has given us’, and for the Saturday Review Jude’s final words represented ‘the voice of the educated proletarian, speaking more distinctly than it has ever spoken before in English literature’.

After Jude Hardy gave up fiction and devoted himself to his first love, poetry. Explaining this change of tack, he pointed out that he had always tried to keep close to natural life and poetry in his novels.

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