especially good in bringing out Hardy’s rootedness in family and in Dorset traditions. Without writing my own essay on Hardy, it is impossible to go much further in reviewing a Life that must have been difficult to write just be cause so much information is available, and so much is open to speculation. Most of Millgate’s attempts to use the life and works for mutual illumina tion are convincing, but I do have a couple of cavils. It may be the case that Hardy was, in writing The Return of the Native, thinking through an analogy between Clym’s mistake in marrying Eustacia and his own in marry ing Emma Gifford; but the suggestion that Emma’s character is the source of the “beautiful but sexually restless and foolishly romantic Eustacia Vye” I find to fit badly with my own sense of the novelist’s attitude toward Eustacia, even granting a good deal of irony in the presentation. One part of Hardy is certainly saying, “Clym shouldn’t have married Eustacia,” but for me another part is saying, “If only Emma were more like Eustacia I might be able to put up with her.” (I’m not sure that I am reading Millgate correctly here, as his treatment of the question is so circumspect.) One other place where Millgate seems to miss an obvious chance to inter pret Hardy the novelist’s intentions usefully is in the discussion of the choice of the name “Jude.” That Jude is an English form of Judas seems much less relevant than the fact that the General Epistle of St. Jude deals in large part with those who give in to the temptations of the flesh, or than the popular reputation of St. Jude the Apostle as a patron saint of those in par ticularly different circumstances — of those engaged in lost causes. But these are minor questions about a masterfully executed task. If Millgate’s biog raphy of Hardy does not quite make Gittings’s volumes obsolete, as there are always details that one writer will stress and another pass over, it will remain the most important reference point for matters about Hardy’s life, and for questions about the accuracy and interpretive approach of all earlier biographies. More details may yet be added to the total picture, but there should be no need for another biographer of Thomas Hardy to start again from scratch. Mic h a e l st eig / Simon Fraser University Judith Scherer Herz and Robert K. Martin, eds., E. M. Forster: Centenary Revaluations (London: Macmillan, 1982; Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1982). 337. $25.00 This volume is a selection of papers from those given to a conference in Concordia University in May 1979 to mark the centenary of E. M. Forster’s 232 birth. Appropriately, they are dedicated to Oliver Stallybrass who, until his death in 1978, was the editor of the Abinger Edition of Forster’s works. The book is divided into five sections and these deal with politics and philosophy, literary history, the novels themselves, a panel discussion and, lastly, a review of recent Forster criticism by the doyen of those studies, Frederick P. W. McDowell. As well as contributions from such established Forster scholars as Wilfred Stone, Nick Furbank, S. P. Rosenbaum, John Colmer, John Beer, and G. K. Das, there are a number of essays from younger critics. John Golmer’s essay, “Marriage and Personal Relations in Forster’s Fic tion,” deals with what Colmer sees as the creative tension between Forster’s preference for the latter and the traditional role of the former in domestic comedy. Colmer outlines three broad functions of marriage in English fic tion. First, where marriage is social and a reward for the heroine who has gained in knowledge. Here it is “the harmony achieved between tempera ment and tradition” (114) and its appearance at the close of such novels makes it clear that it is the highest social good. Secondly, where marriage is part of a critique of society, and when it fails, as it does with Louisa and Bounderby in Hard Times, the causes are seen as social rather than indi vidual...
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Jan 1, 1984
George Donaldson 
Open Access