Abstract
In 1880, the year before Hardy began to plan his discreetly daring Two on a Tower, Maupassant published one of his first, and best-known, short stories, ‘Boule de Suif’. Boule de Suif, a patriotic Rouen prostitute, is its heroine, and the tale tells how, when northern France has been overrun and occupied by the Prussians in 1870, she is compelled to sleep with a Prussian officer in order that her travelling companions (a Count, a Councillor, a rich merchant and two nuns: respectable, self-serving and unpatriotic) can continue their flight from danger. It is a cynical story — its satire, though, implicit with humanity — whose main action concerns a prostitute plying her trade, in this case against her will; sex in a hotel bedroom.
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Notes
Maupassant, Contes et Nouvelles, I (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1974) p. 1361. The note concerns ‘La Maison Tellier’, a happier tale whose subject is a brothel.
Patricia Stubbs in Women and Fiction: Feminism and the Novel 1880–1920 (London: Methuen, 1981) discusses the place of some of these famous heroines, a subject that could easily fill a whole book.
I discussed ‘Vizetelly & Co’ in the Bulletin of the Emile Zola Society, no. 4, Nov. 1992, pp. 7–14.
W. B. Yeats, Autobiographies (London: Macmillan, 1955) pp. 404–5.
Moore, Hail and Farewell (1911), ed. Richard Cave (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1976) p. 51.
Brendan Kennelly, ‘George Moore’s Lonely Voices’, in George Moore’s Mind and Art, ed. Graham Owens (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1968) p. 165.
Guinevere Griest, in Mudie’s Circulating Library (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), discusses the background fully.
Charles Reade, novelist and dramatist, adapted Zola’s L’assommoir for the London stage as Drink in 1879.
Moore, Preface to Piping Hot (London: Vizetelly, 1886).
Moore, ‘Literature at Nurse’ (London: Vizetelly, 1885).
Simon Gatrell, Hardy the Creator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) passim.
Hardy, ‘Candour in English Fiction’, in Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, ed. Harold Orel (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1966; London: Macmillan, 1967) pp. 125–33.
Una Ellis-Fermor, The Irish Dramatic Movement (London: Methuen, 1939) Appendix 3.
Samuel Hynes, ‘The blocked keyhole’, Times Literary Supplement, 18 March 1994.
Review of Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy (London: Bloomsbury, 1994).
Moore, Confessions of a Young Man (1888) (Travellers’ Library. London: Heinemann, 1928) p. 162.
Moore, Conversations in Ebury Street (1924) (Ebury edition. London: Heinemann, 1936) p. 98.
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, vol. 6 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987) p. 242.
This letter of March 28th 1924 is followed by one of April 9th to Murry where the Notebooks’ phrase ‘ludicrous blackguard’ (see below) is repeated. Hardy complains that Moore’s ‘disciples’ (i.e. his friends like Gosse?) don’t protest; they remind him of ‘performing dogs in a show’. Murry’s article, ‘Wrap me up in my Aubusson carpet’ appeared in the New Adelphi, April 1924, and also in New York. See also J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1970) pp. 647–9;
Peter J. Casagrande, Hardy’s Influence on the Modern Novel (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1987) pp. 2–3; and
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982) p. 553.
The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, ed. Richard Taylor (London: Macmillan, 1978) p. 78.
Malcolm Brown, George Moore: a Reconsideration (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1955).
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© 1996 Simon Curtis
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Curtis, S. (1996). Hardy, George Moore and the ‘Doll’ of English Fiction. In: Pettit, C.P.C. (eds) Celebrating Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-14013-8_7
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