4 Quotes by Geoffrey Harvey

However, for Hardy the possibility of poetry’s traditional function of transcendence remains, but in a more limited form. In Hardy’s work the poet transcends himself towards humanity, affirming the central values of loving-kindness and fellowship.

Extremely self-conscious in its craft, in many ways The Hand of Ethelberta is an exploration of fiction as illusion, which involves parody of the conventions it employs; romance, melodrama and farce, and a rejection of realism for absurdist and surrealistic effects. The ‘hand’ of Ethelberta is an obvious, ironic allusion to courtship, and the sub-title, ‘A Comedy in Chapters’, suggests the novel’s affinity with the conventions of Restoration and eighteenth-century comedy of manners.

Tess is not simply presented as a passive victim, however. Throughout the novel she is shown as experiencing tension between the intractable materiality of the social and economic world in which she has to live, and her extraordinarily vulnerable, sensitive self. Hardy is particularly interested in the nature of her consciousness, and in the intense subjectivity of her experience.

Hardy classified A Pair of Blue Eyes among ‘Romances and Fantasies’. A favourite of Tennyson, its melancholy treatment of youth, love and death is expressive of late nineteenth-century susceptibilities. Not unnaturally in an early novel, Hardy draws freely on his own life.