Thomas Hardy

what is his most nihilistic work?

jenks said:

, over reliant on coincidence, etc.

Any thoughts...

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I started Mayor of Castebridge the other day but failed to finish. I've just finished and greatly enjoyed Silas Marner, so I've got a taste for hard-bitten rural stuff which I could put to work on The Mayor...


Silas Marner's plot hinges on coincidence as does the early plot of Castebridge. Why is that an issue? Is it considered lazy?

BTW Jenks, didn't you suggest that I follow American Pastoral with I married a communist?

Well I did and was ground down by it, just as everyone surrounding Ira is ground dy by him.

I love his writing both poetry and the novels...did my dissertation on him.
Certainly Mayor of Casterbridge has coincidence but that criticism (if it is a criticism) can't
be laid at the door of most of his novels unlike some of,for example,Charles Dickens'
stuff which I find can make the whole novel ridiculous.

Hardy is one of the extremely rare figures in any of the arts who can realistically be said to be "world class" in two disciplines (novel and poetry). Of hand from an English perspective I can really only think of Shakespeare (drama and poetry) and Blake (visual art and poetry) although many authorities seem to omit him for some reason; who the same can be said of.

I've read just about all of his novels and a lot of the poetry and to think someone was getting away with such radical stuff in the mainstream at the high watermark of Victorian moralism is quite amazing. I can only think that some of his writing such as the blatant lesbian scene in Desperate Remedies...his first published novel from the late 1860's must have gone right over a lot of the powers that be's heads.
Having said that establishment's reaction to Jude the Obscure was so hostile that it was basically the reason why he never wrote another novel and spent nearly forty years of his life only writing verse.

Finally i don't think anything would have pissed him off more than the industry that has grown up around him connected to some idealised notion of a rural idyll. Hardy was always at pains to show the utter wretchedness of the lot of the rural poor in his novels (Under the Greenwood Tree notwithstanding) the reason why so many thousands preferred to flock to the squalor of the new industrial towns rather than face the even worse deprivation and poverty of the countryside. One of his first published tracts The Dorsetshire Labourer was a tirade against just such misconceptions which were already prevalent even in Victorian times among the urban middle classes.

I think I can see what you mean Jenks. I've only read Far From The Madding Crowd (did it at school) and Tess of The D'Urbevilles (soon after) and since then never touched him again. I kind of enjoyed them but also found them very hard work and very depressing. From what I've read I don't remember any particular reliance on coincidence though.

"Finally i don't think anything would have pissed him off more than the industry that has grown up around him connected to some idealised notion of a rural idyll"

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Damn right. There are some very nice rural scenes and homely village pub bits but they are greatly outweighed by the darkness surrounding them. Tourism isn't going to thrive on the back of that though is it?
Casterbridge is Dorchester right?

as a local boy (and founder member of Wessex Separatist Society ) i was obliged to read Hardy, really, and I devoured the lot. Was pretty obsessed with him in my teens... but.. but..

the thought of reading something like that now just makes me want to curl up and die. Not sure if I've become more stupid, less patient or simply have different tastes, but 11-page descriptions of the window frames on an old Dorset church followed by a couple of pages of repressed emotions or the cruelty of nature just don't rock my world any more..