Abstract
“Fulfilment” is the title Hardy gave to the last “phase” of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and it seems appropriate to apply it also to the last, most distinguished stage of his own career as a novelist. At no period in that career was Hardy more numerously, variously, or richly productive than during the three years which intervened between the commencement of work on Tess in the autumn of 1888 and book publication of the novel in November 1891, and it seems significant both that his most incisive critical essay, “The Science of Fiction”, was published in April 1891, and that he told John Lane in June of that year that he had only recently begun to feel confidence in his work.1 Quite apart from Tess itself, unmistakably his finest novel, and two important essays (“Candour in English Fiction” was published in January 1890), Hardy wrote at this time most of the stories subsequently collected in Life’s Little Ironies (1894); he also collected together and published the volume called A Group of Noble Dames (1891).
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Notes
Newman Flower, Just As It Happened (London, 1950), p. 92.
Cf. John Holloway, ‘Hardy’s Major Fiction’, repr. in Albert J. Guerard, ed., Hardy : A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, N.J., 1963), p. 60, and Philip Mahone Griffith, ‘The Image of the Trapped Animal in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Tulane Studies in English, 13 (1963), 85–94.
‘The Bride-Night Fire’ (formerly ‘The Fire at Tranter Sweatley’s’), Wessex Poems, pp. 94–98. A deletion in the Tess MS, f. 117, shows that Hardy originally intended the milkers’ ballad about a murderer (p. 141) to have been about a maid who went to a wood and came back a maid no more. For the importance of ballads and oral tradition in Hardy, see Donald Davidson, ‘The Traditional Basis of Thomas Hardy’s Fiction’, Southern Review, 6 (1940), 162–178, repr. in Guerard, ed., Hardy : A Collection of Critical Essays, pp. 10–23.
[Charlotte M. Yonge], History of Christian Names (London, 1863), I, 272, Hardy’s copy of a one-volume edition (1884) of this work is in the Colbeck Collection of the University of British Columbia.
Johnson, The Art of Thomas Hardy, enlarged edn. (London, 1923), esp. pp. 227–249;
Schweik, ‘Moral Perspectives in Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, College English, 24 (1962), pp. 16–17. For another comment on the end of chap. 13, see Lodge, Language of Fiction, pp. 177–178.
Cf. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage (London, 1953 ; reissued, New York, 1965), p. 250.
Gregor, ‘The Novel as Protest : Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891)’, in Ian Gregor and Brian Nicholas, The Moral and the Story (London, 1962), p. 137.
See above, p. 268. The sketch map of ‘Tess’s Country’ which Hardy drew for Margaret Deland, the novelist, and her husband was reproduced in Harper’s Monthly Magazine, 151(1925), 239, and on the inside cover of the Harper & Brothers pamphlet, Thomas Hardy : Notes on his Life and Work (New York, n.d.); original in the Purdy collection. On the general topic of travel and movement in Tess, see Tony Tanner, ‘Colour and Movement in Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles’, Critical Quarterly, 10 (1968), 231–232, 235–236.
Dorothy Van Ghent, The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1953), p. 201.
Cf. the references to ‘the fatality of heredity’ and ‘the fatality of environment’ in the first of several passages which Hardy copied out (‘Literary Notes I’, pp. [196]–[198]) from Vernon Lee, ‘A Dialogue on Novels’, Contemporary Review, 48 (1885), 378–401.
Brooks, William Faulkner : The Yoknapatawpha Country (New Haven, 1963), pp. 29, 32–34.
Frederick L. Gwynn and Joseph L. Blotner, eds., Faulkner in the University : Class Conferences at the University of Virginia. 1957–1958 (Charlottesville, Va., 1959), p. [1].
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© 1994 Michael Millgate
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Millgate, M. (1994). Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In: Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230379534_22
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