Florence Henniker

Abstract

Hardy’s professional confidence as a writer is a notable feature of his interview with Raymond Blathwayt at Max Gate early in 1892; equally manifest are the absence of his beard, Emma’s evident desire to impress, and her husband’s complaisance in offering the information that Tess’s wearing of the jewels was her idea (from ‘The Maid on the Shore’). Blathwayt noticed at every turn ‘pieces of red Samian, rare specimens of ancient pottery, fragments of iridescent glass, most of them discovered on his own ground by Mr. Hardy himself, and oh the walls illustrations of his stories by friends, including Professor Herkomer (for the Tess serial) and Alfred Parsons, in addition to his wife’s watercolours, which went far ‘to prove the verisimilitude of her husband’s delightful fictions’. Hardy’s readiness to flinch in a personal crisis was evident, nevertheless, in London, where he was afraid of meeting ‘Saturday Reviewers’ at the Savile; one of them might be his libeller, he wrote. His reaction to Mowbray Morris’s review in the Quarterly gives startling emphasis to his irritation with Victorian readers: ‘if this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me. A man must be a fool to deliberately stand up to be shot at.’ This was in April, after he had written The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved for serialization through Tillotson’s agency.