Hardy and ‘the Woman Question’

Abstract

Thomas Hardy’s career as a novelist coincided with some striking changes in the lives of English women — changes which were mirrored in the novel and which had a deep effect on his last major prose work, Jude the Obscure. In the 1912 Postscript to that novel, Hardy said he had been told by a German reviewer that Sue Bridehead, the heroine, was the first delineation in fiction of the woman who was coming into notice in her thousands every year — the woman of the feminist movement — the slight, pale ‘bachelor’ girl — the intellectualized, emancipated bundle of nerves that modern conditions were producing, mainly in cities as yet; who does not recognise the necessity for most of her sex to follow marriage as a profession, and boast themselves as superior people because they are licensed to be loved on the premises. The regret of this critic was that the portrait of the newcomer had been left to be drawn by a man, and was not done by one of her own sex, who would never have allowed her to break down at the end. KeywordsDouble StandardFeminist MovementWoman QuestionFree UnionFall WomanThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.