Mixed Modes in The Trumpet-Major

Abstract

THOMAS HARDY'S The Trumpet-Major (1880) seems in much too definite a way to be attempting to ‘repeat’ the success story, and the story, of Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), thanks to the worse than muted critical reception of The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) and The Return of the Native (1878). The result might easily have been an exercise in self-parody, or a pot-boiler, but on closer inspection the novel holds up well as an aesthetic achievement, even if first impressions conclude it to be ramshackle, and inattentive critics proceed to judgement without having established just what has been going on. Jim Reilly, for example, claims that its heroine Anne Garland ‘falls for the dragoon John Loveday’,1 while even Valentine Cunningham can speak of ‘the fickleness of Anne Garland's affections’2 in a discussion that is notably critical. Neither statement properly applies here. And the blurb on the cover of the New Wessex edition misses the point, with its idea that Anne ‘finds it hard to resist the attentions of John Loveday, the gallant Trumpet-Major’.3 Alas, she does not.