‘A more material existence than her own’: Epistolary Selves in Hardy’s Fiction

Abstract

In 1877, Samuel Johnson wrote to a letter to Hester Thrale, affirming that ‘[i]n a Man’s Letters […] his soul lies naked’. Since the eighteenth century, epistolary writing, as well as writing about letters, has been shaped by this assumption: that letters can provide direct insights into the heart and mind of the writer. This chapter shows how Hardy subverts this view of the relation between letter and letter writer, and the humanist conception of identity at its basis. The chapter will demonstrate that Hardy’s deployment of letters reveals an extraordinarily modern conception of human identity and subjectivity