Candour in English Fiction

Abstract

In June 1891, less than six months before the appearance of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Hardy published what is perhaps the least engaging of his books, the volume of connected short stories called A Group of Noble Dames. Interest in the work has particularly centred on that grotesque narrative of mutilation, “Barbara of the House of Grebe”, much criticised by contemporary reviewers¹ and subsequently made the subject of hostile comment by George Moore (in Conversations in Ebury Street) and T. S. Eliot (in After Strange Gods). Yet when Hardy had his difficulties with the Graphic prior to publication of six of the “Noble Dames” in its Christmas Number for 1890, it was not to this story that objection seems to have been made but to two stories which revolved upon the illegitimate offspring of members of the aristocracy : the issue was joined not on a question of taste or (to use Eliot’s terminology) of wholesomeness² but on a technical point of conventional morality. It is perhaps not surprising that the manuscript of one of the offending stories, “Squire Petrick’s Lady”, should still preserve Hardy’s angry references to deletions made “solely on account of the tyranny of Mrs. Grundy”, or that Hardy, who seems most to have cherished what others had most criticised, should have particularly recommended “Squire Petrick’s Lady” when sending a copy of the book to his friend Edward Clodd.³