Abstract
The best source of comparison between Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence is Lawrence’s curious little book Study of Thomas Hardy (the Study is curious in its mixture of literary criticism with metaphysics, autobiography, cultural history and other things). In the Study, Lawrence implicitly acknowledges Hardy as his master. Hardy takes on new relevance and stature when we realize that he is the principal influence on one of the two most innovative, twentieth-century English-speaking novelists (the other is Joyce); while we understand Lawrence better when we realize that he differs only in degree from Hardy and when we can trace the roots of Lawrence’s art back through Hardy to George Eliot and Wordsworth.
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Notes
Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968) p. 141. The fact that Lawrence in the Study says not a word about Hardy’s poetry is only a minor influence on Lawrence’s which owes far more to Walt Whitman.
D. H. Lawrence, Study of Thomas Hardy, first published in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers 1936, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking Press, 1968) p. 480. Lawrence also expressed his admiration for Hardy in many places other than the Study, for example: ‘They are all — Turgenev, Tolstoi, Dostoevsky, Maupassant, Flaubert — so very obvious and coarse, beside the lovely, mature and sensitive art of … Hardy’ (Letter of 27 November 1916, The Collected Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. Harry T. Moore, 2 vols [New York: Viking Press, 1962] I, 488.)
Mark Kinkead-Weekes, ‘The Marble and the Statue: the Exploratory Imagination of D. H. Lawrence’, in Imagined Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Butt, ed. Maynard Mack and Ian Gregor (London: Methuen, 1968) p. 380.
See Charles L. Ross, The Composition of The Rainbow and Women in Love (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979) pp. 28–31.
D. H. Lawrence, The Rainbow (New York: Viking Press, 1968) pp. 1–3.
D. H. Lawrence, The Complete Short Stories, 3 vols (New York: Viking Press, 1967) II, 347.
See Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: a Biography (New York: Random House, 1982) p. 295.
The Letters of D. H. Lawrence, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979) I, 205.
D. H. Lawrence, Women in Love (New York: Viking Press, 1966) ch. 14, p. 162.
See, for example, Lascelles Abercrombie’s Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1912), the critical book Lawrence asked to borrow along with Hardy’s novels when he was planning his book on Hardy. If we ‘allegorize the story, then Tess will be the inmost purity of human life, the longing for purity which has its intensest instinct in virginity; and Alec d’Urberville is “the measureless grossness and the slag” which inevitably takes hold of life, however virginal its desires’ (p. 149).
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© 1985 Norman Page
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Langbaum, R. (1985). Hardy and Lawrence. In: Page, N. (eds) Thomas Hardy Annual No. 3. Macmillan Literary Annuals. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07104-3_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07104-3_2
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