The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy by Kristin Brady

Abstract

book, original and provocative, but usually remote and abstract. One is grateful for the occasional flash of wit, for the occasional relief from analysis and speculative argument. a n n e m g w h ir / University of Calgary Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (New York: St. Mar­ tin’s Press, 1982). xii, 235. $65.65 Hardy’s short stories have received scant attention from critics, and the reasons for this are not hard to discover. The recognition of Hardy by the critical and academic establishments as a major writer is relatively recent, though we may be forgiven for forgetting this when confronted with the spate of published Hardyana that the last few years have seen (bibliog­ raphies suggest that, among Victorian authors, he now stands second only to Dickens as an object of academic attention). It is only since about 1970 that the major novels have received their due, and even more recently that Hardy’s poetry has begun to come into its own. The short stories, like the minor novels (the subject of a study by Richard H. Taylor also published in 1982), have naturally had to wait their turn. Another reason is that critics, especially British critics, have never felt at ease with the short story as a genre: commenting on the critical neglect it has suffered, Ian Reid points out that it was not until the OED Supplement of 1933 that the term “short story” even gained official admission to the English vocabulary. As a result, some outstanding practitioners of this form — Kipling is a striking case in point — have been grossly undervalued. Most of Hardy’s critics have ignored his short stories or have dismissed them in an aside: J. I. M. Stewart, for instance, described them as “pot­ boilers,” and Irving Howe said that most of them are “not worth salvag­ ing.” Yet perhaps Kristin Brady exaggerates a shade in saying that “Until recently, Thomas Hardy’s short stories have been ignored by critics and readers alike.” Selections of the stories were published — and presumably bought and read — in 1966, 1970, and 1976, and all the volumes of stories were included in the New Wessex Edition, together with a half-volume devoted to the uncollected stories. It would be interesting to know, indeed, whether they have ever been out of print. So this may be one more instance of a significant gap between the bookshop or public library and the classroom or scholarly journal, between popular recognition and official, institutional acceptance. 97 Arguing that Hardy, who wrote short stories over a period of some thirtyfive years, took the form seriously, and that “many of the best short stories are products of his maturity,” Brady makes a convincing case for redressing the long critical neglect. As she shows, Hardy took considerable pains over the arrangement of the stories in his various collections — hardly the be­ haviour of an author cynically turning out reach-me-down commodities for the market. Her book contains four long chapters, the first three of which deal with Hardy’s first three collections: Wessex Tales, A Group of Noble Dames, and Life’s Little Ironies. One can readily think of other ways of organizing a book on this subject, but the decision is justified by her contention that these three volumes are “artistic wholes in their own right” and that each adds up to something more than the sum of the individual stories. The final chapter examines Hardy’s last collection, A Changed Man, which lacks a “coherent unifying principle” and “is uninteresting when considered as a volume,” together with seven uncollected stories, including the engaging “Old Mrs. Chundle,” which was never published in Hardy’s lifetime. With­ in this framework are analyses of individual stories which, if occasionally a trifle pedestrian, usually throw light on Hardy’s art and make telling crossreferences to his novels and poems. Brady’s consideration of a single story, “The Waiting Supper,” will serve to illustrate her method. In five pages she deals with the circumstances of publication (including differences between the periodical and volume ver­ sions) and the relationship of this story to others written at about the same time and...