Thomas Hardy by Claire Tomalin

Author:Claire Tomalin [Tomalin, Claire]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141909738
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2006-01-10T05:00:00+00:00

To which James, who had previously given some faint praise to the book, excused himself for it and replied, ‘I grant you Hardy with all my heart, and even with a certain quantity of my boot-toe… oh yes, dear Louis, she is vile. The pretence of “sexuality” is only equalled by the absence of it, and the abomination of the language by the author’s reputation for style.’35 No one has ever claimed that the book is perfectly written or constructed, or without clumsiness, but it glows with the intensity of his imagination; and Tess’s capacity to arouse visceral distaste in some and profound affection and admiration in others is a measure of the sexual power he built into his heroine. To Irving Howe, one of Hardy’s best and fairest critics, she is his ‘greatest tribute to the possibilities of human existence, for Tess is one of the greatest triumphs of civilization: a natural girl’.36

It was said that Tess divided families and broke up friendships. Dinner parties had to be rearranged to take account of the warring opinions. And it sold and sold. This, and the effects of the passing of the US Copyright Act in 1890, made Hardy seriously rich. He was able to buy two houses in Dorchester, one for his sisters, both now teaching there, and one as an investment. It also meant that in 1893 he and Emma could for the first time take a whole house for the London Season, moving all their staff to St John’s Wood with them. His social ascent continued. He was elected to the Athenaeum Club, from whose balcony he and Emma watched the German Emperor William II progress through London. He moved in the highest circles, and his fame brought him some amusements. Regarded now as an expert on social problems, he was invited by Millicent Fawcett, a leader of the women’s movement, to write a story for working boys and girls, warning them of the dangers of treating love lightly. He excused himself, saying that to do it properly demanded clear, direct talk, which he knew the public would not tolerate. He went on, ‘The other day I read a story entitled “The Wages of Sin”… expecting to find something of the sort therein. But the wages are that the young man falls over a cliff, and the young woman dies of consumption – not very consequent, as I told the authoress.’37 He smiled again when Arthur Balfour, speaking at a fund-raising dinner of the Royal Literary Fund, gave it as his opinion that literature was in decline and there were now no writers of great merit alive. Hardy was among the guests, who were mostly writers; and noted that not much money was subscribed.38

Even as Tess was published, Hardy was already at work on another serial promised to Tillotson the year before, a light-hearted story called The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, in which he imagines one man falling in love, at the ages of twenty, forty and sixty, with a woman, her daughter and her granddaughter.

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