The Hand of Ethelberta

Abstract

In September 1874, after more than four years of courtship, Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford. By that time the serialisation of Far from the Madding Crowd was already well advanced, and it must have been both professionally and financially reassuring to Hardy to receive Leslie Stephen’s letter of December 2, 1874, asking if he could supply another story for the Cornhill.¹ Stephen mentioned April 1875 as a possible starting date, but Hardy had as yet made little progress with his new novel and the first serial part did not in fact appear until July of that year. Stephen’s letters during the composition of The Hand of Ethelberta again reflect editorial hesitancy about Hardy’s habitual directness. On May 13, 1875, he wrote: “I read with much pleasure the chapters you sent me. I doubt (to mention the only trifle which occurred to me) whether a lady ought to call herself or her writings ‘amorous’. Would not some such word as ‘sentimental’ be strong enough? But I am hypercritical perhaps.”² He also reported, in the same month, the objections which had been raised to Hardy’s sub-title, “A Comedy in Chapters”,³ and these words were omitted from the serial version, only to be restored to the first edition (published in two volumes, in April 1876) and retained in all subsequent editions.