Middling Hardy

Abstract

Since the publication in 1912 of Hardy’s General Preface to the Novels and Poems, which appeared in the first volume of the Wessex Edition, the history of the study of his novels has been (by and large) one of the acceptance of Hardy’s own distinction between seven novels of character and environment which constitute the centre of his achievement, and seven other novels which are peripheral, experimental, trivial, or just downright bad. Richard Taylor, in his recent book The Neglected Hardy, has in some measure fixed this distinction, writing as he does of Hardy’s ‘lesser novels’; it is a division that I find unjustifiable. If such a league-table approach to Hardy is inescapable — and it does have the novelist’s sanction — then there must be a fresh valuation which recognizes that there is a middle category of Hardy novels, one that includes Under the Greenwood Tree as well as The Trumpet-Major, Far from the Madding Crowd as well as Two on a Tower: a group of novels in which Hardy is not aiming for the intensity and heroism of Tess of the D’Urbervilles or The Mayor of Casterbridge, but has different and equally valuable goals which are also more or less satisfactorily achieved.