Volume 7, Number 9 · December 1, 1966
Hardly Hardy
By Irving Howe
Providence and Mr. Hardy
by Lois Deacon, by Terry Coleman
Hutchinson (London), 244 pp., 40 shillings
Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings
edited by Harold Orel
University of Kansas, 295 pp., $6.00
The Architectural Notebook of Thomas Hardy
Introduction by C.J.P. Beatty
The Dorset Natural History and Archaeological Society, 245 pp., £3.3.0
'What has Providence done to Mr. Hardy.' demanded Edmund Gosse, 'that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his creator?' Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman purport to give the answer: Providence had cheated Hardy of a youthful love, his cousin Tryphena Sparks, and he spent the rest of a very long life mourning his loss and writing novels and poems in which she figures (secretly, of course). It is the kind of answer that weakly romantic minds adore. Emily Dickinson must be provided with obscure lovers to 'explain' her poetry, and last year there appeared a dotty book on Edwin Arlington Robinson demonstrating that his poems are mainly about a hopeless love for his sister-in-law. What is still more astonishing is that such books seem to be taken seriously: Providence and Mr. Hardy was well reviewed in a number of English journals.
Review, 1629 words
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