Palgrave Advances in Thomas Hardy Studies pp 229-254 | Cite as
visual inspiration in hardy’s fiction
Abstract
Many acquaintances of Hardy commented on the vigilant qualities of his eyes, clearly evident still in portraits, sketches and photographs. Virginia Woolf remarked, after meeting him at Max Gate in July 1926, on his ‘quizzical bright eyes, for in talk they grow bright’,1 and Ford Madox Ford wrote eloquently of how Hardy’s gaze betrayed a similar kindling of mind. At one of Edward Clodd’s house parties, Ford observed the ‘amazing powers of perception in his keen, limpid, liquid, poet-peasant’s eyes’, and went on to associate this visual alertness with an impulse for exuberant truancy. Hardy, he continued, was ‘as instinct with the feeling of escape as a schoolboy who had run out from his school ranks on some down and was determined on naughtiness’.2 Certainly, Hardy himself conveyed a mild guilt about his inability to stop himself from stealing glances at the faces of others. He once confided to Rosamund Tomson as to this ‘literary habit’, ‘rather a terrible thing’, whereby ‘whenever I travel by train or omnibus, I find myself instinctively observing my fellow-passengers and constructing the story of their lives from what I see in their faces’.3
Keywords
Railway Carriage Hardy Study School Rank Visual Dynamic Terrible ThingPreview
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Notes
- 5.J. B. Bullen, The Expressive Eye: Fiction and Perception in the Work of Thomas Hardy (Oxford, 1986), p. 2.Google Scholar
- 6.Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London, 1975), p. 55. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 10.Henry James, review in The Nation (December 1874), Critical Heritage, p. 28.Google Scholar
- 12.Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major (London, 1974), p. 275.Google Scholar
- 13.John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy (Cambridge, 1978), p. 191.Google Scholar
- 16.See for instance, John Goode, Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (Oxford, 1988), Joe Fisher, The Hidden Hardy (London, 1992), and Peter Widdowson, Late Essays and Earlier (London, 1998).Google Scholar
- 17.Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (London, 1974), pp. 41–2. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 18.Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (London, 1974), pp. 28–9. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 19.Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders (London, 1974), p. 41. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 20.Phillip Mallett, ‘Jude the Obscure: A Farewell to Wessex’, Thomas Hardy Journal, Vol. XI, no. 2 (October 1995), p. 50.Google Scholar
- 21.Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree (London, 1974), p. 55.Google Scholar
- 23.Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Native (London, 1974), pp. 42, 44. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 26.Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (London, 1995), p. 137. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 27.Thomas Hardy, The Well-Beloved (Oxford, 1986), p. 88.Google Scholar
- 30.Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge (London, 1973), p. 274.Google Scholar
- 31.Thomas Hardy, The Hand of Ethelberta (London, 1975), p. 64.Google Scholar
- 32.Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd (London, 1974), pp. 417–18. Subsequent parenthetical references are to this edition.Google Scholar
- 34.It would be interesting to ponder this distinction between ‘seeing’ and ‘looking’ further in relation to the distinction between ‘stative’ and ‘dynamic’ verbs drawn by Randolph Quirk, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik in their Grammar of Contemporary English (London, 1972), pp. 93–7.Google Scholar