‘Something More to be Said’: Hardy’s Creative Process and the Case of Tess and Jude

Abstract

The publication since the middle 1970s of scholarly editions of Hardy’s letters, notebooks, and autobiography, as well as of critical editions of his poems and certain of his novels, makes possible a closer look than before into Hardy’s day-to-day life as a working writer, particularly his sense of his readers and the effect of their responses on his writing.² For the student of Hardy’s creative process, these documents reveal three important shifts in his sixty years of professional writing. Each shift was a clear response to readers’ tastes and opinions, and each marked a turning point in his career as novelist and poet. Furthermore, each revealed Hardy’s continuing need to mediate between two kinds of novelty: what in 1868 he termed ‘novelty of position and view in relation to a known subject’ and ‘absolute novelty of subject’.³