A Group of Noble Dames: Ambivalent Exempla

Abstract

Like Wessex Tales, A Group of Noble Dames is a collection of stories from the Wessex past. But, as Hardy told Harper’s in 1890, the later volume is ‘of a somewhat different kind’ from his previous work, ‘excepting The First Countess of Wessex, which comes near it in character’.1 Since the exception Hardy cited is the volume’s most documented story, it is likely that what he thought distinctive in A Group of Noble Dames is its whimsical use of history, different in method and tone from his other fiction about the past. Most of these stories are set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — a period that Hardy could not in the majority of cases have learned of from people who were alive at the time — and their reconstruction of events is fantastical rather than retrospective, imaginary rather than imaginative. Although Hardy claimed that the women in the volume were ‘mostly drawn from life’2 and wrote to Lord Lytton that he got the stories ‘from the lips of aged people in a remote part of the country’,3 his chief known source is Hutchins’s History of Dorset. Indeed, the collection seems to have fewer direct links with oral tradition than Hardy’s other stories set in the past. Whereas the preface to Wessex Tales cites spoken reminiscences as its main origin, the introductory remarks to A Group of Noble Dames stress that its roots are in the written ‘pages of county histories’ (vii).*