‘Middling Hardy’: Reconsidering His Readers

Abstract

‘Middling Hardy’ is a term applied to that ‘stretch of six rather lost years in Hardy’s creative life from 1879 to 1884 … a period which falls into the middle of Hardy’s fictional career’, when he might have been expected to produce his best work, but instead wrote many of the novels which have come to be regarded as mediocre (Gatrell 1986a: 70–1). I have included The Return of the Native in this category partly because it was so spectacularly unsuccessful at the time, both critically and commercially, and partly because it was the critical onslaught on this novel that forced Hardy into a reconsideration of his work, turning away from tragic and artistic intensity to a style intended to be more ‘reader friendly’. Most accounts of his career present the three novels which followed The Return of the Native as a ‘relapse’ (to use the term employed by Beach for the middle section of his book) or as a ‘recession’ (the title Millgate gives to the middle part of his account of Hardy’s career). My own focus will be on the changed attitude these novels display towards his readers. For the two novels which followed his ‘failure’ at tragedy Hardy attempted to provide his readers with the gentle amusement they appeared to crave. In the third, however, he took his revenge, playing with them in a manner that can only be called mischievous.