Maud 1855

Abstract

Tennyson in the 1840s had been so beset by misery that his mildly defiant creation took the shape of banter, fantasy, and eva sion: The Princess. In the 1850s he was fortified by marriage, fi nancial security, and the Laureateship; he could now afford a more audacious exorcism: Maud. Maud was an intense and precarious attempt—compacted and impacted—to encompass the bitter expe riences of four decades of a life in which many of the formative influences had also been deformative. Maud is a story of hereditary melancholia and madness; of a father’s bankruptcy and suicide; of family feud; of a love which unexpectedly flowers in spite of snobbery and opposition, but which then, expectedly and grimly, is shattered; of death and loss; of brutal Mammonism. It is a story which gave fierce play to all the central griefs and grievances of Tennyson’s life. His dismay at his father’s ravings, financial deg radations, and suicidal proclivities. His ache at his mother’s lone liness. His distaste for the Old Man of the Wolds, aloofly machin ating, and for the vulgar pretensions and political posturings of the Tennyson d’Eyncourts ( “Seeing his gewgaw castle shine, / New as his title, built last year”). His profound exasperation at being torn by “the feud, / The household Fury.”