Shock, Success, and Marriage

Abstract

Hardy was happy writing in the bedroom study which overlooked the garden and orchard at Higher Bockhampton. He could meditate on his subject as he walked in congenial surroundings on the heath or in the neighbouring woods, jotting down his thoughts, sometimes, when he had no scrap of paper with him, on ‘large dead leaves, white chips left by the wood-cutters, or pieces of stone or slate that came to hand’; he had found that ‘when he carried a pocket-book his mind was barren as the Sahara’. The high hopes he entertained are the subject of his poem ‘In the Seventies’, where he speaks of the ‘magic light’ that ‘certain starry thoughts’ threw on his ‘worktimes and soundless hours of rest’, and of the vision which was unknown to his neighbours and the ‘nodders’ whom he passed. Not until the end of September did he forward, at Leslie Stephen’s request, all he had written, enough for two or three monthly parts in The Cornhill. It was sufficient for Stephen to make a final acceptance.