Hardy’s Shorter Fiction

Abstract

Hardy wrote nearly fifty short stories the majority of which are available in Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life’s Little Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). Most of these stories were written during the period 1874–1900 simultaneously with Hardy’s major fiction. The care with which he revised and arranged many of these short stories suggests that he took as much interest in them as in his other writings. They should not be treated as hack-work any more than the novels which were written piecemeal under the same pressures from the ‘Grundyist’ and the subscriber. In both the novels and the stories Hardy was forced to pander to the demands of the magazines and consequently to inhibit or distort or bowdlerise his narratives. As well as being artistically satisfying to their creator these novels and stories also had to be commercially viable, saleable products. What is important is that he was as reluctant to perform these forced operations on the stories as on the novels. In the MSS of some of the stories in A Group of Noble Dames Hardy makes recurrent references to ‘the tyranny of Mrs Grundy’ and has bluepencilled many lines which had to be deleted against his wish.