The novel Archives - Page 17 of 20

The Warden

November 16, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, and web links

The Warden was first published in 1855 by Longman. It was Trollope’s fourth novel, but the first in the series which became known as The Barsetshire Chronicles, and it established his reputation as a popular novelist. The others in the sequence are Barchester Towers, Doctor Thorne, Framley Parsonage, The Small House at Allington, and The Last Chronicle of Barset.

The opening of the novel makes it clear that Barchester was supposed to be a cathedral town in the south west of England, and it is probably constructed imaginatively from elements of Salisbury and Wells cathedrals, which Trollope knew well from his travels around the south west in his professional capacity as inspector of the postal system. (He is credited with having invented the post box.)

Anthony Trollope

The Warden – critical commentary

The strengths

Undoubtedly the main strength of this novel is the characterisation of the Reverend Harding – the gentle, considerate widower who looks after his charges in the hospital with loving care; who has a passion for music and has published a book on the subject at his own expense; and who plays the cello imaginatively when in an emotionally charged state. He also has a finely developed conscience, which does not let him continue in a sinecure that provides him with a generous living for little effort and few responsibilities.

Both friends and enemies alike urge him to stay where he is, but he cannot live with the thought that the money which provides his generous income might rightly belong to the twelve paupers whose care is his raison d’etre as warden.

Contemporary and modern readers alike can be forgiven for thinking that some last-minute reprieve will solve his dilemma – and it is to Trollope’s credit that no such melodramatic solution comes about. Harding moves out of his comfortable home with his unmarried daughter; he sells furniture; he goes to live in rented accommodation; and he ends up in a much smaller parish on a reduced income.

The reader therefore is left with no uplifting conclusion to the novel – except that Reverend Harding has acted according to his conscience and paid the material price of doing so. This plot construction is admirably restrained, and the best feature of the novel.

The weaknesses

But there are a number of weaknesses. The most important is thematic; the lesser weaknesses are technical – to do with the art and craft of novel-writing. The main problem arises from the fact that the trigger for the entire drama is political and financial malpractice in the established church. This corruption ranges from simony (the selling of church preferments and benefices) to nepotism (favouritism to relatives in making appointments).

As a major landowner the church had (and still has) vast reservoirs of wealth which it used to pay its clergy, all of which the novel makes fairly clear. And some of the positions they held are largely sinecures. Indeed, part of the warden’s moral dilemma is not just that he is receiving a large annual salary to which he might not be legally entitled, but that he receives this salary for doing next to nothing.

But the study of this moral problem remains at a purely personal level. The warden’s distressed state of mind is traced minutely by Trollope, but no attempt is made to explore the larger issues of ecclesiastical politics, finances, and corruption – even though famous legal cases are mentioned in the narrative.

We do not even know if Reverend Harding’s salary is a legitimate outcome of Hiram’s will or not – because even the Queen’s Council does not come to any conclusion on the matter. The most important legal and financial issue underpinning the story is simply left unexamined.

It is as if Trollope can only see as far as ‘characters’ – the tender hearted warden and the arrogant archdeacon – and is not interested in probing the causes of the social problems that make up his story. Neither is the chain of responsibility for the administration of the will examined, and the roles of the bishop, archdeacon, warden, and steward are all left at the level of friendships and family connections.

Technical weaknesses

There are two problems to which many critics have found objection on the grounds of disrupting the tone and the manner of the novel. The first of these is the introduction of huge digressions when Trollope suddenly launches a chapter-long satirical attack on the Jupiter newspaper – which everybody above the age of fifteen would have known full well to be his fictionalised version of The Times.

The characters and their interaction with each other are suddenly put on hold whilst Trollope criticises the newspaper for its dominance, its undue influence in society, and its lack of accountability (a criticism which he does not think to apply to the church).

These are fairly reasonable views to hold against the press – but Trollope almost abandons his responsibility to construct a coherent novel in his eagerness to berate (at great length) the organ which is bringing questionable practices within the church to the public’s attention.

This is followed by two further digressions with similar purposes – the parodies of Carlyle and Dickens. His accounts of Dr Pessimist Anticant [Thomas Carlyle] and Mr Popular Sentiment [Charles Dickens] become like two obtrusive satirical essays inserted into the delicate fabric of the novel.

It is not Trollope’s opinion of Carlyle and Dickens one objects to, but the fact that no attempt has been made to integrate these episodes with the remainder of the novel. They are materials of a different kind to the lives of the Reverend Harding, his daughters, and his domestic life. As Henry James observes in his essay on Trollope (in Partial Portraits) ‘both these little jeux d’esprit are as infelicitous as they are misplaced’.

This technical flaw is both signalled and reinforced by Trollope’s weakness with names. It is simply not possible to construct a credible fictional world in the realist tradition, containing railways, cathedrals, and named London streets, then populate it with characters called Sir Abraham Haphazard, Dr Pessimist Anticant, Mr Popular Sentiment, and Reverend Quiverful. These belong possibly in an eighteenth century work, but they cannot sit persuasively alongside characters called Eleanor Harding and Mr Chadwick.

The Warden – study resources

The Warden – OUP paperback – Amazon UK

The Warden – OUP paperback – Amazon US

The Warden – All six of the Barsetshire novels – £0.50

The Warden – All the Barsetshire novels – Amazon UK

The Warden – Project Gutenberg eBooks [FREE]

The Warden – Audiobook – FREE at LibriVox

Anthony Trollope – A website with plots summaries, TV and Radio links, quotes, quizzes, seminar groups, competitions – official site of the Trollope Society.

The Warden – plot summary

Chapter 1. The Reverend Septimus Harding is a modest clergyman in the cathedral town of Barchester in the south west of England. He is in charge of an almshouse for twelve old workmen, and he supplements their meagre weekly allowance from his own stipend. Rumours begin to circulate that his own generous income should be divided amongst his charges, according to the terms of Hiram the founder’s will.

Chapter 2. John Bold has inherited property, and although technically a surgeon, he practises medicine amongst the poor without charging for his services. He is a radical reformer and is in love with Harding’s daughter Eleanor. Harding’s son-in-law Archdeacon Grantly disapproves of Bold, who starts legal enquiries into the financial basis of the almshouses (the hospital).

Chapter 3. Bold asks Harding to discuss the terms of Hiram’s will. Harding pleads ignorance, but is upset by the fear that he might be in the wrong in accepting a salary which ought to be distributed amongst more needy recipients. Harding consults the bishop, who refers him to his son the strict archdeacon. Harding also reveals the discomfiture he feels in his position because Bold is linked romantically to his daughter Eleanor.

Chapter 4. The twelve occupants of the hospital are divided over the issue of what they are led to believe is their rightful inheritance of one hundred pounds a year for each man. But eventually nine of them put their names to a petition, defying their ‘leader’ Bunce, who is against the action.

Chapter 5. The archdeacon visits the hospital and lectures the men, criticising them for their petition. He seeks legal advice from a Queen’s Counsel, Sir Abraham Haphazard. The warden is deeply embarrassed by the public dispute and the threat to his good reputation.

Chapter 6. Bold’s sister Mary tries to persuade him to give up the case for the sake of their friendship with the Harding family – but he is resistant. Mary attends a party at the warden’s home, following which Eleanor exchanges views with both her father and with Bold.

Chapter 7. The scandal becomes more widely known and is taken up by the national daily newspaper the Jupiter [The Times] which elevates it to a conflict between Church and State, and between Protestant and Catholic politics.

Chapter 8. The archdeacon lives very comfortably but his practical wife disagrees with his position regarding the scandal – largely because it impedes Eleanor’s chances of securing Bold as a husband. She also thinks it causes unnecessary worry to her father. Chadwick arrives with an opinion from Sir Abraham Haphazard – that there are weaknesses in the legal documents which the archdeacon assumes to be favourable to his case.

Chapter 9. In private conference the archdeacon reveals Sir Haphazard’s opinion to the bishop and the warden, claiming that they have nothing to fear, but insisting that the opinion is kept secret. The warden is deeply troubled by the lack of clarity on the matter, even though the legal opinion clears him of any blame. He thinks of resigning from his position as a solution to the dilemma, but the archdeacon bullies him in the name of the larger good of the Church.

Chapter 10. The warden is completely crestfallen and sees his reputation and his way of life in ruins. He eventually confides in his daughter Eleanor, who comforts him and encourages him to give everything up and live in an untroubled state of simplicity.

Chapter 11. Eleanor decides to rescue her father’s feelings by appealing to John Bold to call off his inquiries. When she does so, Bold pours out his heart and his love for her. There is an implication that these avowals constitute an engagement. He agrees to leave the case alone, even though others might continue to pursue it.

Chapter 12. Bold visits the archdeacon to inform him of his intention to abandon the case. Dr Grantly receives the news with lofty disdain and insults Bold, refusing to believe that he is acting in good faith.

Chapter 13. When Eleanor goes to tell her father that Bold is calling off the action, it is too late. Another editorial in the Jupiter names the warden specifically in the scandal. Harding decides to go to London to confront Haphazard. He also has plans to retire to another parish.

Chapter 14. Bold arrives in London to see Tom Towers, journalist for the Jupiter. A whole chapter is devoted to a satirical critique of the newspaper and the unaccountable power it holds in forming and manipulating public opinion.

Chapter 15. When Bold confronts Towers he finds that the case has been taken up by Dr Pessimist Anticant [Thomas Carlyle] and Mr Popular Sentiment [Charles Dickens]. Towers flatly refuses to use any influence on the paper on the spurious grounds of impartiality and public interest. Bold buys a copy of the serial novel The Almshouse [which is a benign parody of Dickens].

Chapter 16. Rev Harding also goes to London – to see Haphazard and escape from the archdeacon. When he is kept waiting for an appointment he hides in Westminster Abbey, wrestling with his conscience. He then passes time in a supper-house and a coffee shop.

Chapter 17. Sir Abraham Haphazard, the attorney general, tells Harding that Bold has withdrawn his legal action and advises him to forget the issue and continue in his present position. He is unable to explain the exact terms of Hiram’s will. But Harding insists that it is a matter of conscience, and feels that he has no option but to resign from his position as warden.

Chapter 18. When the warden arrives back at his hotel, the archdeacon argues that it would be madness to resign his position – using largely financial arguments. But Rev Harding sticks to his position to resign, even though he will lose his income.

Chapter 19. The next morning, despite entreaties from his daughter to delay the decision, the warden writes two letters of resignation to the bishop then returns home. The archdeacon visits his lawyers, who propose the solution of an exchange arrangement with another parish.

Chapter 20. The bishop accepts Harding’s resignation but offers him money and accommodation in order to help him survive. But Harding refuses both offers – as he does the idea of an ecclesiastic exchange. He bids a sad farewell to the bedesmen in the hospital.

Conclusion. Harding moves into lodgings and eventually becomes preceptor in a small Barchester parish. living in reduced circumstances. Eleanor marries Bold, who gradually becomes friendly with the archdeacon.

The Warden – principal characters

Reverend Septimus Harding	the warden of the hospital for elderly paupers at Barchester
Susan Harding	his elder daughter, married to the archdeacon
Eleanor Harding	his younger daughter, in love with John Bold
Dr Theophilius Grantly	the conservative archdeacon, son of the bishop, and the warden’s son-in-law
John Bold	a non-practising surgeon and radical reformer
Mary Bold	his sister and friend to Eleanor Harding
Chadwick	the steward of Hiram’s will
Finney	Bold’s lawyer
Mr Bunce	the aged ‘sub-warden’ at the hospital
Sir Abraham Haphazard	a London barrister QC
Tom Towers	a journalist and editor of The Jupiter

The Warden – further reading

Ruth apRoberts, Trollope, Artist and Moralist, London: Chatto and Windus, 1971.

Victoria Glendenning, Trollope, London: Pimlico, 2002.

Henry James, Partial Portraits, 1888.

James R. Kincaid, The Novels of Anthony Trollope, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Ellen Moody, Trollope on the Net, London: Hambledon Continuum, 1999.

Richard Mullen, Anthony Trollope: A Victorian in his World, London: Duckworth, 1990.

Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope, Lanham Rowman & Littlefield (MD), 1982.

Donald Smalley, Trollope: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge, 2013.

John Sutherland, Victorian Fiction: Writers, Publishers, and Readers, London: Palgrave, 2006.

Anthony Trollope, An Autobiography, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Stephen Wall, Trollope and Character, London: Faber and Faber, 1988.

The Well-Beloved

July 17, 2014 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Well-Beloved was first serialized in the London Illustrated News in 1892. It was then published as a complete novel in 1897 by Osgood, McIlvaine & Co. The full title was originally The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament, which emphasises the protagonist’s fixation on the ‘ideal woman’.

The Well-Beloved – critical commentary

Sex in the novel

Despite all Jocelyn’s romantic idealism and his incontinent fixations on younger and younger women, he actually spends the whole novel with no sexually consummated adult relations at all.

This is strange, because the events of the narrative begin with a typically Hardyesque appeal to old folk traditions of pre-marital sex. Jocelyn arranges to meet the first Avice at night in the castle, presumably with a view to taking advantage of this tradition. But she sends him a note canceling the rendezvous specifically on the grounds that she does not agree to the idea – which certainly confirms that she was conscious of this being the reason for their nocturnal meeting.

Jocelyn goes off instead with Marcia, a woman who just happens to be walking past at the time, and he proposes marriage to her as soon as they reach London. It’s true that he spends a few days in a hotel with Marcia when he is supposed to be arranging their marriage. This would have been unthinkable in his native environment, but could pass in the more socially advanced mores of the capital. Yet there is nothing in the text to suggest that they enjoy a sexual relationship.

Just as he thinks he is going to secure the second Avice, she reveals that she is already married to someone else, and there is a suggestion that as a couple they have taken advantage of the island custom, which rubs salt into Jocelyn’s emotional wound at the time.

The same happens with the third Avice, who when confronted by his offer of marriage, runs off with someone else of her own age. Jocelyn thus spends the whole novel (forty years plus) pursuing phantoms. It is to presumably part of Hardy’s purpose to reveal this emotional absurdity. Then in the end Jocelyn settles for a marriage of convenience with his old friend Marcia Bencomb in a union which he rather tastelessly points out to her is based on friendship and certainly not love.

Hardy explored the consequences of sexual desire and activity in many of his novels (as frankly as was permitted at the time) most notably in Jude the Obscure which he wrote only a few years later in 1895. But The Well-Beloved appears to explore nothing more than the futility of pursuing idealised concepts of the opposite sex, which Jocelyn does – three times over.

The result of Jocelyn’s experiences might be thought as Hardy’s warning against romantic idealization – yet there is very little evidence in the text to support this idea. Jocelyn’s life trajectory is not held up as a failure or an example of emotional under-development. He is simply driven by this impulse until his last attempt fails and he is prepared to settle for a sexless relationship based on an old friendship.

Readers embarking on psychological interpretations of novels and their authors might like to keep in mind that not long after the publication of The Well-Beloved Thomas Hardy married a woman (Florence Dugdale) who was forty years younger than him – possibly an instance of what Oscar Wilde claimed was ‘life imitating art’?

Social background

The practical working background of the novel is sensitively observed. Just as every aspect of woodcutting and the timber business informs The Woodlanders, and agriculture permeates Tess of the d’Urbervilles, here in The Well–Beloved the stone industries of Portland are carefully incorporated. The business of mining and cutting stone is the enterprise on which the Bencomb and Pierston businesses were founded, and Hardy pointedly reminds us in one part of the story that the local stone was used to build St Paul’s cathedral.

This is Hardy the son of a stonemason and himself an architectural designer underscoring the commercial life of Wessex out of which these lives have emerged. It is unfortunate that the fictional integration of the commerce and the business dynasties are not so well incorporated as they are in the other novels. They do not form essential parts of the narrative in the same way as the destinies of Giles Winterbourne and Tess are determined by their occupations in the rural industries in which they participate.

Moreover, Jocelyn rises to fame as a sculptor, a shaper of this local stone – but without any credible evidence of his artistic talents or activity. None of his work is discussed, and the twenty year periods between each version of Avice are skipped over without comment. This reinforces the idea that all Hardy’s attention was focused onto Jocelyn’s obsession with his ideal woman, and it contributes to the overwhelming sense of weakness in The Well-Beloved compared with his other great novels.

The Isle of Slingers

Hardy chose to re-name the location of the novel, as he did in so many of his other works. But ‘The Isle of Slingers’ is actually an old name for Portland Island – given to it because of the habit of the local population to hurl stones at unwanted visitors – or ‘kimberlins’ or ‘foreigners from the mainland of Wessex’ as they are called in the text.

The total population of the island around that time was only about eighty households, which coupled with the xenophobia enshrined in its popular name, resulted in a great deal of inter-marriage and the fact that everybody knew everybody else’s business. These social factors are well reflected in the novel .

Avice Caro marries a cousin (which was legally controversial at the time); all three generations of women have the same first name (Avice); and the grand-daughter eventually marries someone with the surname Pierston – which is that of the protagonist, Jocelyn.

The three Avices, the second something like the first, the third a glorification of the first, at all events externally, were the outcome of the immemorial island customs of intermarriage and prenuptial union, under which conditions the type of feature was almost uniform from parent to child through generations.

The Well-Beloved – Study resources

The Well-Beloved – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Well-Beloved – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

The Well-Beloved – eBooks at Project Gutenberg

The Well-Beloved – audiobook at LibriVox.org

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

The Well-Beloved – plot summary

Part First

Chapter I. Would-be sculptor Jocelyn Pierston returns to his native Isle of Slingers [Isle of Portland] in Dorset to visit his father after three years living in London. He is greeted enthusiastically with a kiss by his childhood friend Avice Caro.

Chapter II. Jocelyn reassures the embarrassed Avice, and proposes marriage to her, then immediately regrets it. He has a romantically idealised image of Woman which is constantly shifting from one object to another. Avice has become a cultivated woman, and after a month’s sojourn they are understood to be engaged.

Chapter III. At the end of his holiday Jocelyn goes to meet Avice at night to say farewell, but she does not show up at the appointed place.

Chapter IV. She sends him a note excusing herself because she does not approve of the local tradition of pre-marital sex. He leaves nevertheless and meets Marcia Bencomb, who is running away from home and her father, who is a rival to Jocelyn’s father in the stone quarrying trade.

Chapter V. Jocelyn and Marcia shelter from a sudden storm under a boat, then they are forced to stay overnight at a hotel in Budmouth.

Chapter VI. They travel together to London where, having decided that Marcia is the latest incarnation of his ideal woman, Jocelyn asks her to marry him. They book into a hotel, and he goes to make the necessary marriage arrangements, then visits his friend Somers who is a painter.

Chapter VII. Jocelyn explains to Somers his personal theory of the idealised woman, up to his recent experiences with Avice and Marcia. He rationalises his fickleness, them temporises with Marcia regarding the marriage arrangements.

Chapter VIII. Jocelyn and Marcia squabble over their uncertain social status. She writes to her father, who refuses to endorse her proposed marriage on grounds of rivalry between the two families. Marcia leaves the hotel, and is subsequently taken back home by her father. Jocelyn later hears that Avice has married a cousin and that Marcia is to go on a world tour with her father.

Chapter IX. The years pass. Jocelyn becomes a successful sculptor, but he continues to flit from one example of his idealised woman to another.

‘The Isle of Slingers’

Part Second

Chapter I. When Jocelyn is middle-aged his father dies, leaving him quite wealthy. He attends a fashionable party, still in search of his ideal woman, and thinks he might have found her in the form of Mrs Nicola Pine-Avon, an intellectual widow.

Chapter II. But when he visits Mrs Pine-Avon he finds her rather remote, so he insults her and leaves. At another social event he reads a letter telling him that Avice has died.

Chapter III. This news inflames his old feelings for Avice, who he now realises he has undervalued, and he bitterly regrets the loss. He goes back to the island in time to see her buried in the local churchyard.

Chapter IV. He meets Avice’s daughter Ann, whose family fell on hard times, leaving her to work as a laundress. Jocelyn thinks of her as the reincarnation of her mother; he calls her by her mother’s name; and wishes he could live locally and pay court to her.

Chapter V. Back in London he meets Avice (Ann) at the docks and feels powerfully attracted to her, even though she is only a laundress. He decides to rent a manor-house on the island so as to be near her.

Chapter VI. He arranges for Avice to visit his house daily to do his laundry. He thinks of her as the original Avice – and realises that he is hopelessly in thrall to a woman who he ‘despises’ intellectually.

Chapter VII. Jocelyn pursues Avice in her daily life on the island. She reveals her knowledge of her mother’s sad history (deserted by her intended) and even though she seems indifferent to him, Jocelyn decides he wants to marry her.

Chapter VIII. When he next confronts her she reveals that she rapidly tires of men after first finding them attractive. But he still intends to pursue his plans.

Chapter IX. Jocelyn is jealously watching Avice take washing to a soldier-lover when his friend Somers suddenly arrives. Jocelyn admits he is completely in thrall to Avice. He is then visited by Mrs Pine-Avon, who pays court to him, but he is completely consumed by his current obsession.

Chapter X. Somers sees Mrs Pine-Avon and wants to marry her. Avice is upset about something, and Jocelyn offers to take her on as a temporary help in London.

Chapter XI. When they get there his housekeepers have drunk his wine and absconded. Avice keeps herself separate from him, even though he feels completely responsible for her welfare.

Chapter XII. Eventually he asks her to marry him. She refuses, revealing that she has already married Isaac Pierston, with whom she has quarrelled and separated. Jocelyn reveals his former relationship with her mother, and he takes Avice back to the island.

Chapter XIII. Isaac is brought back and reconciled with his wife, who then has a baby she christens Avice. Jocelyn goes back to London, where Somers is due to marry Mrs Pine-Avon.

‘The Isle of Slingers’

Part Third

Chapter I. Twenty years later Jocelyn is in Rome, having sent Avice money from time to time. He receives a letter from her telling of her husband’s death, and he decides to visit the island. She is living in his old house, and he immediately entertains the idea of marrying her – until he sees her daughter, who he regards as the reincarnation of her grandmother.

Chapter II. Jocelyn has misgivings that the old curse is still upon him. He rescues the young Avice when she is stuck on some rocks and feels that he detects a direct connection running from grandmother to grand-daughter.

Chapter III. He revisits young Avice’s mother and proposes to marry the girl. She agrees to help him in such a plan. They all visit the castle where Jocelyn was supposed to meet young Avice’s grandmother. Avice’s mother encourages her daughter to favour Jocelyn, but the girl is not really interested – and so far she has only ever seen him at night.

Chapter IV. An aged Somers suddenly appears along with his matronly wife (Mrs Pine-Avon) and several children. Jocelyn stays away from young Avice during their visit. Mother Avice falls ill, but she persuades her daughter to accept Jocelyn because he is kind, rich, and upper class. Jocelyn reveals to her his connections with her mother and grandmother – and at the same time he begins to think that the marriage might not be a good idea.

Chapter V. Jocelyn takes Avice and her mother to his new house and studio In London, but Avice is still not enthusiastic about him. He goes back to the island on what is supposed to be the eve of his wedding day.

Chapter VI. Mother Avice is ill, but glad to have her plans for her daughter’s wedding almost fulfilled. However, young Avice elopes with young Henri Leverre the same night, and her mother dies with the shock of events.

Chapter VII. Marcia Bencomb (Leverre’s stepmother) arrives [after forty years] to seek out Jocelyn via the odd connection between them. Jocelyn accepts what has happened, and promises to settle a handsome dowry on young Avice.

Chapter VIII. Mother Avice is buried, then Jocelyn falls ill, after which he loses his interest in aesthetics. Marcia nurses him, and reveals herself as the older woman she now is. They move back to the island and eventually get married (as old friends, not lovers). Jocelyn devotes himself to improving local living conditions.

Hardy’s WESSEX

The Well-Beloved – principal characters

Jocelyn Pierston	a young would-be sculptor
Avice Caro	his childhood friend
Mrs Caro	a widow, her mother
Marcia Bencomb	daughter of rival family to Pierstons
Alfred Somers	Jocelyn’s friend, a painter
Mrs Nicola Pine-Avon	a young intellectual widow
Ann Avice Caro	Avice’s daughter, a laundress
Avice Pierston	Avice Caro’s daughter, a governess

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is probably the most popular of Hardy’s late, great novels. The sub-title is ‘A Pure Woman’, and it is a story which explores the tragic consequences of a young milkmaid who becomes the victim of the men she encounters. First she falls for the spiritual but flawed Angel Clare, and then the physical but limited Alec Durberville takes advantage of her. This novel has some of the most beautiful and the most harrowing depictions of rural working conditions which reveal Hardy as a passionate advocate for those who work the land. It also has a wonderfully symbolic climax at Stonehenge on Salisbury Plain. There is poetry in almost every page.
Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

The Woodlanders (1887) Giles Winterbourne, an honest woodsman, suffers with the many tribulations of his selfless love for Grace Melbury, a woman above his station in this classic tale of the West Country. She marries the new doctor, Edred Fitzpiers, but leaves him when she learns he has been unfaithful. She turns instead to Giles, who nobly allows her to sleep in his house during stormy weather, whilst he sleeps outside and brings on his own death. It’s often said that the hero of this novel is the woods themselves – so deeply moving is Hardy’s account of the timbered countryside which provides the backdrop for another human tragedy and a study of rural life in transition.
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Wessex Tales Don’t miss the skills of Hardy as a writer of shorter fictions. None of his short stories are really short, but they are beautifully crafted. This is the first volume of his tales in which he was seeking to record the customs, superstitions, and beliefs of old Wessex before they were lost to living memory. Yet whilst dealing with traditional beliefs, they also explore very modern concerns of difficult and often thwarted human passions which he developed more extensively in his longer works.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors, actors, production features, box office, film reviews, and even quizzes.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Wings of the Dove

February 24, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, resources, video, further reading

The Wings of the Dove (1902) is one of James’s late, great masterpieces. Quite apart from the famous baroque prose style, it features many of his recurrent themes. American innocence pitched against European cunning. The plot is a complex love triangle which strains at the limits of what is morally acceptable. Even for modern readers, the scheming and motivations will seem quite shocking.

The heroine Kate Croy is in love with a man who hasn’t enough money to offer her a fashionable marriage. She thinks she can enhance her lover’s financial prospects by pushing him into the arms of a rich American heiress who is dying – but she doesn’t count on the unexpected results.

The setting is a Venice that includes the usual correlatives of disease and death. And a social depth which is more-than-usually concerned with issues of money, social status, and class mobility. Be prepared for long and complex sentences which strain many readers’ patience.

Venice

The Wings of the Dove – plot summary

Kate Croy and Merton Densher are two engaged Londoners who desperately want to marry but have very little money. Kate is constantly put upon by family troubles, and is now living with her domineering aunt, Maud Lowder. Into their world comes Milly Theale, an enormously rich young American woman who had previously met and fallen in love with Densher, though she didn’t reveal her feelings. Her travelling companion and confidante, Mrs. Stringham, is an old friend of Maud’s. Kate and Aunt Maud welcome Milly to London, and the American heiress enjoys great social success.

With Kate as a companion, Milly goes to see an eminent physician, Sir Luke Strett, because she’s afraid that she is suffering from an incurable disease. The doctor is noncommittal but Milly fears the worst. Kate suspects that Milly is deathly ill. After the trip to America where he had met Milly, Densher returns to find the heiress in London. Kate wants Densher to pay as much attention as possible to Milly, though at first he doesn’t quite know why. Kate has been careful to conceal from Milly (and everybody else) that she and Densher are engaged.

With the threat of serious illness hanging over her, Milly decides to travel to Venice with Mrs. Stringham. Aunt Maud, Kate and Densher follow her. At a party Milly gives in her Venice palazzo (the older Palazzo Barbaro, called “Palazzo Leporelli” in the novel), Kate finally reveals her complete plan to Densher: he is to marry Milly so that, after her presumably soon-to-occur death, Densher will inherit the money they can marry on. Densher had suspected this was Kate’s idea, and he demands that she consummate their affair before he’ll go along with her plan.

Aunt Maud and Kate return to London while Densher remains with Milly. Unfortunately, the dying girl learns from a former suitor of Kate’s about the plot to get her money. She “turns her face to the wall” and grows very ill. Densher sees her one last time before he leaves for London, where he eventually receives news of Milly’s death.

Milly does leave him a large amount of money despite everything. But Densher won’t touch the money, and he won’t marry Kate unless she also refuses the bequest. Conversely, if Kate chooses the money instead of him, Densher offers to make the bequest over to her in full. The lovers part on the novel’s final page with a cryptic exclamation from Kate: “We shall never be again as we were!”

Study resources

The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Wings of the Dove – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – Norton Critical Editions – Amazon UK

The Wings of the Dove – 1997 film adaptation on DVD

The Wings of the Dove – eBook version at Project Gutenberg

The Wings of the Dove – authoritative text

The Wings of the Dove – audioBook at LibriVox

The Cambridge Companion to Henry James – Amazon UK

Henry James – biographical notes

Henry James at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Henry James at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

Principal characters

Kate Croy	a talented but scheming young woman
Merton Densher	a Fleet Street journalist with aspirations
Milly Theale	an American orphan and heiress
Aunt Maude Lowder	Kate’s aunt, who maintains her – at a price
Susan Stringham	a Vermont widow and companion to Milly
Lord Mark	a fortune-hunting aristocrat who Maude ‘intends’ for Kate

The Wings of the Dove – film version

1997 film adaptation

This is a lush and beautiful film version of the novel from director Iain Softley. His London scenes are successful, but the film really comes alive visually in Venice, though it has to be said that the explicit sexual content is somwhat at odds with Jame’s original text, where everything is implied and suggested rather than made overt. Helena Bonham Carter gives a typically pouting and sexy performance as the emotionally scheming Kate Croy, and Alison Elliot is convincingly consumptive as the heiress Milly Theale. Even the costumes were nominated for an Academy award in this outstanding production which captures faithfully the spirit of the original novel.

See reviews of the film at the Internet Movie Database

Other works by Henry James

The Bostonians (1886) is a novel about the early feminist movement. The heroine Verena Tarrant is an ‘inspirational speaker’ who is taken under the wing of Olive Chancellor, a man-hating suffragette and radical feminist. Trying to pull her in the opposite direction is Basil Ransom, a vigorous young man from the South to whom Verena becomes more and more attracted. The dramatic contest to possess her is played out with some witty and often rather sardonic touches, and as usual James keeps the reader guessing about the outcome until the very last page.

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

What Masie Knew (1897) A young girl is caught between parents who are in the middle of personal conflict, adultery, and divorce. Can she survive without becoming corrupted? It’s touch and go – and not made easier for the reader by the attentions of an older man who decides to ‘look after’ her. This comes from the beginning of James’s ‘Late Phase’, so be prepared for longer and longer sentences. In fact it’s said that whilst composing this novel, James switched from writing longhand to using dictation – and it shows if you look carefully enough – part way through the book.

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The Ambassadors (1903) Lambert Strether is sent from America to Paris to recall Chadwick Newsome, a young man who is reported to be compromising himself by an entanglement with a wicked woman. However, Strether’s mission fails when he is seduced by the social pleasures of the European capital, and he takes Newsome’s side. So a second ambassador is dispatched in the form of the more determined Sarah Pocock. She delivers an ultimatum which is resisted by the two young men, but then an accident reveals unpleasant truths to Strether, who is faced by a test of loyalty between old Europe and the new USA. This edition presents the latest scholarship on James and includes an introduction, notes, selected criticism, a text summary and a chronology of James’s life and times.
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Buy the book at Amazon US

Henry James – web links

Henry James at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides, tutorials on the Complete Tales, book reviews. bibliographies, and web links.

The Complete Works
Sixty books in one 13.5 MB Kindle eBook download for £1.92 at Amazon.co.uk. The complete novels, stories, travel writing, and prefaces. Also includes his autobiographies, plays, and literary criticism – with illustrations.

The Ladder – a Henry James website
A collection of eTexts of the tales, novels, plays, and prefaces – with links to available free eTexts at Project Gutenberg and elsewhere.

A Hyper-Concordance to the Works
Japanese-based online research tool that locates the use of any word or phrase in context. Find that illusive quotable phrase.

The Henry James Resource Center
A web site with biography, bibliographies, adaptations, archival resources, suggested reading, and recent scholarship.

Online Books Page
A collection of online texts, including novels, stories, travel writing, literary criticism, and letters.

Henry James at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of eTexts, available in a variety of eBook formats.

The Complete Letters
Archive of the complete correspondence (1855-1878) work in progress – published by the University of Nebraska Press.

The Scholar’s Guide to Web Sites
An old-fashioned but major jumpstation – a website of websites and resouces.

Henry James – The Complete Tales
Tutorials on the complete collection of over one hundred tales, novellas, and short stories.

Henry James on the Internet Movie Database
Adaptations of James’s novels and stories for the cinema and television – in various languages. Full details of directors and actors, production features, film reviews, box office, and even quizzes.

More on Henry James
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The Woman in White

November 2, 2016 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, further reading

The Woman in White (1861) was one of the best-selling novels of the nineteenth century. It not only sold in thousands of copies but also created what we would now call a ‘franchise boom’. It was so popular that manufacturers produced Woman in White perfumes and clothing, and proposals of marriage were made to the courageous (but fictitious) heroine Marian Halcombe.

The publication introduced two new elements into the novel genre. It was a ‘sensation novel’ or a ‘novel with a secret’ as they came to be known. It was also tightly plotted and intricately organised in a manner that makes powerful intellectual demands on the reader. And, it should be noted – it was structured and related by a multiplicity of narrative voices in a remarkably successful manner.

The Woman in White – a note on the text

The Woman in White first appeared as a serial in All the Year Round, the weekly newspaper owned and edited by Charles Dickens. The novel ran between November 1859 and August 1860, and enormously increased sales of the newspaper.

It then appeared in what (at that time) was a conventional three-volume format, published by Sampson Low, and was an immediate success. Its initial printing of 1,000 copies sold out on the first day, despite a relatively high cost of 31s 6d.

The success of the novel led to further editions and printings in America, Australia, France, and Germany. For all of these productions Wilkie Collins tweaked and supplemented the text. The most ‘stable’ and reliable version of the novel is generally considered to be the ‘New Edition’ created for the single-volume publication of the book in 1861.

For a full account of the composition, publication, and reception of the novel, see the bibliographic essay by John Sutherland in the Oxford World’s Classics edition of the book

The Woman in White – critical commentary

The detective novel

Wilkie Collins is often credited with the invention of the detective novel – which is not quite true. The first real detective hero in fiction was Auguste Dupin, the super-rationalist of Edgar Allen Poe’s stories, who solves crimes largely by a combination of creative imagination and what Poe called ‘ratiocination’. The second major fictional detective was Inspector Bucket in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House (1852) who is a superior sort of Scotland Yard dogged sleuth-investigator.

The Woman in White is in one sense a detective novel without a detective. The central character Walter Hartright acts as a form of solicitor-cum-sleuth. He assembles what we would now call ‘witness statements’- letters, depositions, diaries, and memoirs to provide a body of evidence supporting his case against the villains ‘Sir’ Percival Glyde and Count Fosco.

This ‘case’ never reaches a formal trial. We the readers are the unstated jury, and Walter‘s evidence proves the case he is making against the two accused men and their accomplice, the sinister Countess Fosco.

Wilkie Collins flags up at the start of the novel the originality of this quasi-legalistic approach – for which he justly deserves credit. The ‘hero’ Walter Hartright points out that his collection of personal testimonies will constitute the voices normally heard in a court of law:

Thus, the story here presented will be told by more than one pen, as the story of an offence against the laws is told in Court by more than one witness – with the same object, in both cases, to present the truth always in its most direct and most intelligible aspect, and to trace the course of one complete series of events, by making the persons who have been most closely connected with them, at each successive stage, relate their own experience, word for word.

Multiple narrators

Wilkie Collins’ genius lies in making his collection of narrators credible, yet partial, flawed, and even downright deceptive – yet he does so in such a manner that the reader can piece together a coherent account of what has taken place.

The framing narrative perspective comes from Walter Hartright, who is baffled by events, but is truthful in what he relates. Whilst absent from events, he hands over to Marian Halcombe, who is a more complex character. She is initially impressed by both Percival Glyde and Count Fosco, even though it will be clear to most readers that they are devious and villainous.

The housekeeper Eliza Michelson is even more gullible: she is taken in completely by Fosco’s oleaginous flattery. The solicitor Gilmore is accurate but short-sighted, and he too is taken in by Glyde and Fosco. The narrative even includes a supposedly full ‘confession’ from Fosco himself. This is a literary masterpiece (on Collins’ part) of lies, half-truths, self-justification, and evasiveness, all dressed up in his flamboyant, vainglorious style of speech and writing.

It is often observed that the use of multiple narrators had been pioneered by writers such as Tobias Smollett in Humphry Clinker (1771) and Emily Bronte in Wuthering Heights (1847) – but Wilkie Collins pushed this literary device along a few stages further.

In Fosco’s contributions to the narrative for instance, he throws up factual smokescreens, he lies, and he even offers taunting satirical comments on other people’s evidence. Both his entries in Marian’s diaries and his last-minute ‘confession’ are superb examples of Wilkie Collins’ multi-layered approach to the construction of a narrative.

Fosco is contributing to the account of events; he is passing comment on them; he is attempting to distort the record of what happened, and he is also mischievously aware of being an actor in the narrative of the drama – making him almost a self-conscious fictional character.

The sensation novel

Wilkie Collins is generally regarded as the inventor of the ‘sensation novel’ – and The Woman in White is seen as the first and classic example of this particular genre, the influence of which lingered until the end of the nineteenth century. At that later point its vogue in popular fiction was overtaken by the even more extreme Gothic horror story.

The sensation novel made its impact by introducing issues such as sexual scandal. murder, disguise, bigamy, madness, blackmail, fraud, theft, kidnapping, incarceration, and disputed wills. It also relied heavily on mysteries and secrets underpinning events – which is certainly true of The Woman in White, which has a number of mysteries, but ultimately rests on one Big Secret.

This is the fact that ‘Sir’ Percival Glyde is bogus throughout the whole novel – because he does not legitimately hold the title of Baronet. His parents are not married, and the legitimate title belongs to someone else. Glyde is a fraud – and that is the source of his Secret. He is guilty of false identity – technically ‘personification’

This leads to another typical element of the sensation novel – forgery. Glyde illegally inserts details of his parents’ non-existent marriage into the parish register. He does this for three reasons: he wishes to assume right to the Baronetcy; he wants to inherit the Fairlie estate; and he needs legitimacy to give himself the legal possibility of borrowing money against the Fairlie ‘name’.

Imprisonment

The Woman in White involves not just one but two instances of illegal imprisonment. Anne Catherick (The Woman) is placed in a lunatic asylum against her will by Glyde – because he fears she might reveal his Secret. She escapes, goes into hiding, and tries to warn Laura about him.

When Glyde learns that there has been contact between the two women, he assumes that his Secret has been revealed (which it has not) and he then imprisons his own wife in the asylum – but does so under Anne Catherick’s name. This is a sort of ‘double imprisonment’ for Laura.

Subsequent to this, as part of what we might now call ‘identity theft’, Anne Catherick (who dies) is buried not in her own name but in Laura’s.

The other shocking elements of ‘sensation’ should be fairly obvious to modern readers. Glyde becomes a psychologically and physically abusive husband to Laura; letters are intercepted, stolen, and re-written; a death certificate is forged; there is a great deal of spying; and Count Fosco and his sinister wife drug their victims using what he a euphemistically refers to as an interest in ‘chemistry’.

The legal problem

There is however something of a puzzling issue at the base of the plot line of The Woman in White. As a fake Baronet badly in need of money, the villain Glyde goes to extraordinary lengths to secure Anne’s inheritance of twenty thousand pounds. He will not marry her unless she agrees to the condition, and he has the gullible solicitor Gilmore draw up legal agreements to secure it.

Yet under the law obtaining at the time the novel is set (and was written) all of a woman’s property and money automatically passed into the control of the man she married. This was one of the scandalous iniquities of English law which was much debated and eventually changed with the passing of the Married Woman’s Property Act in 1882.

Even worse at that time, a woman ceased to be a legal or moral entity when she married. It was not until the Act of 1882 that these conditions were changed.

So there was no need for ‘Sir’ Percival Glyde to resort to solicitors: Laura’s money would come to him automatically – unless Collins was suggesting that Glyde’s false legal status could invalidate the process, but there is no consideration of this point in the text.

Characterisation

In terms of literary characterisation, The Woman in White poses some interesting problems. The positive characters – hero and heroines – are thin and unprepossessing, whereas some of the negative characters are quite vivid, memorable, and even amusing.

The protagonist and main narrator Walter Hartright is honourable, loyal, and indefatigable in his pursuit of the truth regarding the mystery. But as a character he is rather bland and unmemorable. Similarly, the ostensible ‘heroine’ of the novel, Laura Fairlie, is like a child’s doll. She might be pretty, but she is an agent who is acted upon but makes no positive impression of any kind.

Laura’s half-sister Marian starts out as a more interesting creation – with un-corsetted haunches and mannish behaviour – but this side of her character is not developed. She becomes merely the stoic tomboy who climbs onto a verandah in the rain, and eventually endures typhoid fever. The most interesting thing about her is that she ends up living in a ménage a trois with her married half sister and brother-in-law.

Yet amongst the negative characters, Wilkie Collins creates two inspired characters. The first is self-obsessed aesthete Frederick Fairlie who hides from the world behind a wall of hypochondria which is so advanced he would rather not be bothered talking to anybody, and wants doors closed quietly so as not to upset his nerves.

The acute nature of his avoidance of all responsibility becomes quite comic. He is a similar character to Horace Skimpole in Bleak House (1852) – a man who has elevated self-interest into a philosophy and an art form. When Count Fosco tries to reassure Fairlie that Marian’s typhoid fever is not contagious, he recoils with shock and horror:

Accept his assurances! I was never farther from accepting anything in my life. I would not have believed him on his oath. He was too yellow to be believed. He looked like a walking West-Indian-epidemic. He was big enough to carry typhus by the ton, and to dye the very carpet he walked on with scarlet fever.

The other stand-out character is his fellow villain Count Fosco, a fat, witty, sophisticated, larger-than-life character who is quite obviously not at all that he seems. He flatters everybody he meets, dabbles in ‘chemistry’ (which is his euphemism for poison) and has pet mice and birds about his person, He turns out to be not only a charlatan but a spy who in his ‘confession’ at the end of the novel gives a boastfully frank account of his criminality in a typically oblique fashion:

If Anne Catherick had not died when she did, what should I have done? I should, in that case, have assisted worn-out Nature in finding permanent repose. I should have opened the doors of the Prison of Life, and have extended to the captive (incurably afflicted in mind and body) a happy release.

The Woman in White – study resources

The Woman in White – Oxford Classics – Amazon UK

The Woman in White – Oxford Classics – Amazon US

The Woman in White – Penguin Classics – Amazon UK

The Woman in White – Penguin Classics – Amazon US

The Woman in White – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Woman in White – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Woman in White – York Notes – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Wilkie Collins – Kindle eBook

The Woman in White – 1982 BBC film

Wilkie Collins

The Woman in White – plot synopsis

The First Epoch

Artist Walter Hartright saves Professor Pesca from drowning at Brighton. Pesca passes on to Walter the request for a private tutor in drawing in Cumbria.

Walter meets the Woman in White late at night on Hampstead Heath. She has connections with Limmeridge House in Cumbria where he is going. She claims to have been ill-used by a Baronet, and has escaped from an Asylum.

Walter travels to Limmeridge House, meeting the shapely but mannish Marian Halcombe. He tells her about the Woman in White’s association with the house. He is interviewed by Frederick Fairlie who is an aesthete and a valetudinarian.

He meets Laura Fairlie and immediately falls in love with her. Marian reads from her mother’s letter and a connection is established between Laura and Anne Catherick (the Woman in White) because of similarities in their dress.

Marian explains to Walter that he must leave, because Laura is engaged to be married to Sir Percival Glyde. She produces an anonymous letter, warning Laura not to marry Glyde, who is a Baronet from Hampshire.

Walter meets Anne Catherick and her friend Mrs Clements in the graveyard. Anne has no father, and is at odds with her mother. At the mention of Sir Percival Glyde she goes into a seizure of fear.

Walter and Marian go to the farm where Anne is staying, but she has left the same morning. Sir Percival Glyde is the visitor expected at Limmeridge House.

The solicitor Gilmore arrives and reassures Walter that Glyde is completely honourable. Marian and Laura thank Walter for his help – and he leaves Limmeridge.

Glyde arrives and persuades Gilmore that he has acted on Mrs Catherick’s own wishes in ‘providing’ a private Asylum for her daughter Anne. He also persuades Marian to write to Mars Catherick for proof of his claim.

A response from Mrs Cathherick supports Glyde, who gives Laura every latitude in coming to her decision about the marriage. She asks for more time, and Gilmore supports her.

A week later Gilmore gets a letter saying Laura will marry Glyde before she is twenty-one. Glyde (who has no money) insists on receiving Laura’s twenty thousand pounds as part of the marriage settlement.

Gilmore appeals to Laura’s guardian Fairlie to let her retain the twenty thousand pounds, but Fairlie refuses to take any interest in the case.

Laura wishes to tell Glyde that she is in love with Walter, but Glyde refuses to call off the engagement, claiming he loves Laura all the more because of her fine principles.

Glyde prides himself on his absence of any jealous feelings. Laura capitulates, and Walter leaves for Honduras.

Glyde sets a date. Laura complies passively. Marian finds more and more positive qualities in Glyde, who is still searching for Anne. Marian has presentiments that something will prevent the marriage, but it takes place.

The Second Epoch

Six months later Marian has arrived at Blackwater Park; Walter is in Honduras; Gilmore is ill; and Laura is on honeymoon in Europe. Marian visits the ominous Black Lake, then finds Mrs Catherick’s dog which has been shot by the park keeper.

On return Laura will not discuss her new marriage, yet asks about Walter. Glyde is even more distant and short-tempered. Marian gives a positive account of the fat and sleek Count Fosco, with his pet birds and tame mice. Glyde’s solicitor Merriman suddenly arrives from London.

Marian overhears news of Glyde’s money problems. She and Laura suspect that Fosco knows the details. On an excursion to the Lake they discuss Crime and its detection. Glyde learns about Mrs Catherick’s dog and is alarmed.

Glyde wants Laura to sign a legal document but will not reveal its content. She refuses, and there is a violent disagreement. Marian writes to Gilmore’s office for advice, but Fosco reads the letter.

Laura reveals to Marian that she knows Glyde married her for her money, and that he has learned of her love for Walter. He threatens to persecute both of them. They think they see a woman walking round the Lake.

A solicitor’s letter from London recommends not signing the document. Marian dreams about Walter in Honduras. Laura meets a distraught and dying Anne in the boat house. Anne wants to impart Glyde’s ‘secret’ to her – but doesn’t.

Laura is due to meet Anne in the boat house, but is intercepted by Glyde. He interrogates her then imprisons her in the House. Fosco’s spying is exposed, yet he persuades Glyde to release Laura.

Marian writes to the solicitor and to Mr Fairlie, trying to arrange a temporary refuge for Laura. She gives the letters to Fanny who has been dismissed and is returning to Limmeridge House.

Marian climbs out onto a verandah roof in the rain to overhear Glyde and Foco plotting to get money from Laura, and the search for Anne Catherick. Glyde assumes that Hartright and Laura know his ´secret´, which is also known by Anne Catherick and her mother.

Marian falls ill. Fosco confiscates and reads her diaries, even writing a mock-complimentary entry in them.

Fanny arrives at Limmeridge House with Marian´s letter. She has been intercepted and drugged by Countess Fosco. Count Fosco arrives to announce that Marian has a fever and to suggest that Fairlie should avoid a scandal by receiving Laura. Fairlie takes the line of least resistance and accepts.

The naive housekeeper Eliza Michelson gives an admiring view of Fosco, who plants an accomplice Mrs Rubelle in the sick room. Marian’s illness grows worse, and proves to be typhoid fever. When she recovers, the doctor is dismissed and Glyde sacks all the servants.

Mrs Michelson is sent away on a pointless errand to Torquay. On her return, Marian has been taken away by Fosco. Laura leaves Blackwater Park next day for London and Cumbria. Mrs Michelson discovers that Marian is still at Blackwater Park, and resigns her post. Mrs Rubelle leaves, and so does Glyde, in a great hurry.

Laura is taken to St John’s Wood in convulsions. She gets worse and appears to die of a diseased heart Walter Hartwright returns from abroad. He visits Laura’s grave, where he is met by Marian and Laura herself.

The Third Epoch

Count Fosco sends a letter to Marian announcing Laura’s death. Marian asks her solicitor to check, but he finds no suspicious circumstances. Count Fosco attends the funeral and writes that Anne Catherick has been recaptured and sent back to the Asylum.

Marian goes to the Asylum where the patient turns out to be Laura. Marian bribes a nurse to release her, and they go to Cumbria where her uncle refuses to recognise her [Fosco has kidnapped Laura, drugged her, and taken Laura to the Asylum as the recaptured Anne.]

Walter sets up in hiding with Marian and Laura. He begins to assemble evidence and accounts of events from participants (which constitute the text of the novel).

He consults the solicitor Kyle who warns him that he has no legal case. Walter is being followed by Glyde’s agents.

Walter tracks down Anne’s friend Mrs Clements, who relates that she took Anne to Grimsby for safety, but when Anne fell ill she wanted to communicate something to Laura. At Blackwater Park Mrs Clements meets Fosco who deceives her, prescribes drugs for Anne, and suggests their going to London. Once there, Fosco and his wife kidnap Anne.

Mrs Clements then relates the history of the Catherick family. Mrs Catherick refused to marry until she suddenly became pregnant by someone else. Percival Glyde came to live near them and began an intrigue with Mrs Catherick. When her husband discovered this, he beat Glyne, then emigrated. He pays his wife an allowance, which she does not touch, living instead off payments from Glyde.

Walter questions Mrs Catherick, who remains implacably opposed to answering any of his questions about Anne and Glyde. Walter assumes that Glyde is not Anne’s father.

Walter inspects the marriage records in an old vestry for evidence of Glyde’s parents’ marriage and finds a dubious entry. When he inspects a duplicate set of records he finds no entry. On his way back to the vestry he finds it on fire, with Glyde trapped inside. Walter organises a rescue, but it fails, and Glyde is killed.

Walter receives a letter from Mrs Catherick that reveals how Glyde forged the entry in the register of marriages. His parents were not married, and he needed a certificate in order to raise money on the estate. Mrs Catherick does not get on well with her daughter Anne, who learns that there is a secret but does not know its details. Nevertheless Glyde locks her up in an asylum with her mother’s consent.

Marian recounts meeting Fosco, who makes vague threats but reveals a vague sexual ‘interest’ in her. Consequently, Marian and Laura move house. Walter conjectures that Anne and Laura might have the same father.

Walter feels that to protect Laura from Fosco he must marry her. He wishes to establish her true identity against all the false evidence of her death. They get married.

Walter concludes from the existing evidence that Fosco must be a spy. He takes Pesca to identify Fosco at the opera – but Fosco is terrified by the sight of Pesca, who then reveals that he is a member of a secret revolutionary brotherhood.

Walter concludes that Fosco has a price on his head. He writes a letter to Pesca to be acted on if necessary the following morning, then goes to interview Fosco.

They challenge and threaten each other, but finally Walter gives Fosco a chance to escape in exchange for a written confession.

The confession relates how Fosco and Glyde arrived in England, both of them short of money. Fosco conceives the plan of extracting money out of Laura via her close resemblance to Anne.

His interest in ‘Chemistry’ is used to justify administering drugs to people, and he intercepts their mail. He kidnaps Anne, who dies in his house, then he conveys Laura under sedation to the asylum.

Walter gathers further documentary evidence, then Laura is taken back to Limmerage House where she is reinstated, despite the resistance of her uncle Fairlie. Walter organises a public statement of events, and then they return to London.

Walter receives a commission in Paris, where he learns about the assassination of Fosco. Walter and Laura have a child, who on the sudden death of his relative Frederick Fairlie inherits the Limmerage estate.

The Woman in White – principal characters

Walter Hartright	a teacher of drawing (28)
Sarah Hartright	his sister
Professor Pesca	a dwarf teacher of Italian
Anne Catherick	the Woman in White
Marian Halcombe	shapely, poor, mannish
Laura Fairlie	rich, pretty, Marian’s half-sister
Frederick Fairlie	an aesthete and valetudinarian
Mrs Vesey	a vapid former governess to Laura
Percival Glyde	a fake and impoverished ‘Baronet’
Vincent Gilmore	the Fairlie family solicitor
Mrs Clements	a friend to Anne Catherick
Mr Merriman	Glyde’s solicitor
Count Fosco	an Italian aesthete and spy
Countess Fosco	Fairlie’s sister, Laura’s aunt
Eliza Michelson	housekeeper at Blackwater Park
Mrs Rubelle	nurse employed by Fosco
Mr Kyle	solicitor in Gilmore’s office

The Woman in White – further reading

William M. Clarke, The Secret Life of Wilkie Collins, London: Ivan R. Dee, 1988.

Tamar Heller, Dead Secrets: Wilkie Collins and the Female Gothic, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992.

Winifred Hughes, The Maniac in the Cellar: Sensation Novels of the 1860s, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Sue Lonoff, Wilkie Collins and his Victorian Readers: A Study in the Rhetoric of Authorship, New York: AMS Press, 1982.

Catherine Peters, The King of Inventors: A Life of Wilkie Collins, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014.

Walter C. Phillips, Dickens, Reade, and Collins: Sensation Novelists, New York: Library of Congress, 1919.

Lynn Pykett, Wilkie Collins: New Casebooks, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1998.

Nicholas Rance, Wilkie Collins and Other Sensation Novelists: Walking the Moral Hospital, London: Palgrave-Macmillan, 1991.

More on Wilkie Collins
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The Woodlanders

October 10, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, commentary, and study resources

The Woodlanders. There were no less than ten versions of this novel during Hardy’s lifetime. The first appearance of the text was as a serial which ran in the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar between May 1886 and April 1887 and in Britain in Macmillan’s Magazine at the same time. It was then published as a one-volume novel later in 1887. There followed subsequent editions in England, America, and a ‘colonial’ edition – all of which Hardy edited, making small changes in locations and emphases to the story. There were also numerous pirated editions in America – because International Copyright agreements did not come into effect until 1891.

The Woodlanders – commentary

Melodrama

The crucial dramatic scene in which Grace goes to seek help from Giles is a classic instance of Victorian melodrama writ very heavily indeed. Modern readers can be forgiven for feeling that the situation in the novel at this point has been especially constructed to wring every last drop of pathos from the story.

We know that Giles has been in love with Grace from their earliest days – and has remained loyal to his feelings of respect for her. He has seen her choose Fitzpiers as a husband for reasons of social aspiration, and has simultaneously lost his own precarious social status because his house has been ‘repossessed’. He lives as an outcast, on the fringes of Hintock society, and the repossession of his home is symmetrically in favour of Mrs Charmond, his rival’s lover.

But at this point in the narrative Grace realizes that Giles is a worthy man who she loves after all. Fitzpiers has deserted her with the seductive Felice Charmond and Grace has nobody else to turn to. Fitzpiers returns to Hintock (Felice having been shot in the meantime) hoping for a reconciliation and Grace is in flight from him.

Grace is taken in and protected by Giles, but he is so scrupulous about protecting her reputation he offers to give up his own primitive lodgings and to sleep somewhere else himself. To emphasize his recognition of social boundaries, he even locks her in the house and gives her the key.

Moreover, since Giles is in fact very ill, he protects Grace from the knowledge of his condition by talking to her through a window, so that she will not see his emaciated face. And the somewhere else he goes to sleep is no more than a rustic bivouac which offers him no protection from the storm. As a result of exposure to the rain (on top of his already fevered condition) he dies.

This saintly self-sacrifice may be regarded as a form of voluntary martyrdom on Giles’s part, or alternatively as an almost pathological degree of masochism. The result in either case is the logical extension of such attitudes – which is death.

Literature and morality

It is worth noting that whilst Hardy generally accepted the censorship imposed by publishers, he manages to work into the novel what would be considered at the time a number a risqué scenes.

When Grace meets Felice Charmond when they are both (symbolically?) lost in the woods, Felice reveals the true state of her relations with Grace’s husband Fitzpiers. Hardy has Felice whisper the information (quite unnecessarily) into Grace’s ear – whereupon Grace exclaims ‘O my great God! … He’s had you! Can it be – can it be!’

When Fitzpiers elopes with Mrs Charmond and her divorce is refused, Grace ‘realises’ that she loves Giles after all. So when they meet to consider their bleak future prospects she decides that it would not be wrong to enjoy some sort of physical intimacy with him after all, and she offers herself to him in a manner which would undoubtedly be seen as sexually provocative at the time: “Why don’t you do what you want to?”

Then when Grace is hiding in the cottage she drags Giles’s dying body back into the hut, removes his wet clothes, and puts him into the bed – a scene of intimacy which Hardy emphasises by calling it ‘her bed’.

When Grace miraculously (improbably?) avoids getting caught in the man-trap at the end of the novel, she is forced to remove her skirt in order to escape – immediately after which she decides to give herself up to Fitzpiers again.

Textual history

The genesis of the text presents an interesting picture of authorship and publishing history at the end of the nineteenth century. Hardy might have been frustrated by the prudishness of his publishers (which is one reason why he eventually gave up writing novels) but he took every opportunity to revise his work and to sharpen the focus of his stories, and he was also a practical businessman so far as exploiting the commercial value of his work was concerned. The Woodlanders went through a number of versions before the text was stabilized.

1. The original conception was planned as what he called ‘a woodland story’ in 1874 as a successor to Far from the Madding Crowd, but Hardy put the idea to one side whilst he was writing The Hand of Ethelberta, The Return of the Native, The Trumpet Major, Two on a Tower, and The Mayor of Casterbridge.

2. Ten years later Macmillan’s Magazine wanted a new novel to be serialized. Hardy produced the original manuscript, which is now in the Dorset County Museum.

3. But after revising the galley proofs for Macmillan, Hardy astutely sold the novel to the American magazine Harper’s Bazaar. He revised the version which they serialized and then made more substantial changes to the one-volume version of the novel produced by the parent company Harper and Brothers in 1887.

4. Hardy made further revisions to the galley proofs before returning a third set to Macmillan for their first UK publication between May 1886 and April 1887. [It should be noted that at the time, nobody would be keeping track of all these revisions, ‘improvements’, and changes. That sort of literary scholarship would only come much later.]

5. The first three-volume UK edition of the novel was published by Macmillan in 1887, and at the same time a ‘Colonial’ edition was prepared for sale in the English-speaking colonies such as Canada, Australia, and South-Africa. The purpose of these editions was to reach these outlets first, before the American editions could capture the market.

6. A number of pirated editions also appeared in America – which proves the popularity of Hardy’s work on both sides of the Atlantic. The establishment of International Copyright agreements did not take place until 1891, which helped to put an end to this practice. Hardy naturally had no hand in the preparation of these editions.

7. Hardy changed publisher to Osgood, McIlvaine, who in 1896 issued the collected edition of Hardy’s work called the Wessex Novels. This enabled Hardy to make yet further revisions to the text.

8. But in 1903 Hardy returned to his previous publisher Macmillan, who also wanted to produce a ‘definitive’ edition of Hardy’s work, which they called the ‘Uniform Edition’. Once again, Hardy took the opportunity to revise the text.

9. This process of revisions and new editions continues through Macmillan’s ‘Wessex Editions issued between 1912 and 1914. These are now considered the more or less definitive editions. There was also a commemorative ‘Mellstock Edition’ issued in 1920, but Hardy did not revise the Woodlanders volume.

10. There were two levels of revision made to the work at each of these stages. The first were minor issues of emphasis to the story which Hardy made in response to reader’s criticism. In editing terms, these are called substantives. The second level is matters of punctuation and text presentation (such as capitalization, spelling, speech marks, and italics). These might have been Hardy’s revisions, but they would often be governed by the publisher’s house style.

The Woodlanders – study resources

The Woodlanders – (xford Classics – Amazon UK

The Woodlanders – Oxford World Classics – Amazon US

The Woodlanders – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

The Woodlanders – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Thomas Hardy – Kindle eBook

The Woodlanders – eBook formats at Project Gutenberg

The Woodlanders – audiobook version at Project Gutenberg

The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Authors in Context – Thomas Hardy – Amazon UK

Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy – Amazon UK

The Woodlanders – principal characters

Mrs Dollery	a horse drawn van driver
Mr Percomb	a master barber
Marty South	a young woman who is in love with Giles
John South	her father (55)
Mrs Felice Charmond	a rich landowner, mistress of Hintock House, a former actress
Giles Winterborne	a dealer in apple trees and cider pressing
George Melbury	a timber merchant
Grace Melbury	his young and educated daughter (20)
Mrs Lucy Melbury	his second wife, Grace’s ex-nurse
Grammer Oliver	old servant of the Melburys
Edred Fitzpiers	a country doctor and would-be scientist
Robert Creedle	assistant worker to Giles
Suke Damson	a hoyden
Tim Tangs	her fiancé, a wood turner
Fred Beaucock	an ex lawyer’s clerk

The Woodlanders – plot summary

Chapter I. Master-barber Percomb gets a lift in Mrs Dollery’s van to Little Hintock.

Chapter II. Percomb tries to persuade Marty South to sell her long chestnut hair, which has been seen and requisitioned by rich landowner Mrs Charmond. He offers Marty two guineas, but she refuses, because she thinks her hair is an essential asset in trying to attract Giles Winterborne.

Chapter III. At night Marty takes the spars she has made to the local timber dealer, George Melbury. There she overhears his worries about his daughter Grace and his plans to marry her to Giles. She goes home and cuts off her hair. In the morning Giles calls for her and they load up the spars.

Chapter IV. Melbury despatches Giles to collect his daughter Grace, who is returning from college. Melbury would like her to marry Giles, even though he doesn’t think him high enough in class terms. He thinks of this as compensation for having won his first wife from Giles’s father.

Chapter V. Giles gives Marty a lift to Sherton Abbas, then is met by Grace. On her way back on foot, Marty is given a lift by Mrs Charmond.

Chapter VI. Giles drives Grace home, trying to revive their past relationship as sweethearts – without success. Grammer Oliver tells Grace about Fitzpiers, a doctor who experiments in science and anatomy who has moved into the locality.

Chapter VII. Giles follows Melbury and Grace into the woods where there is a sale of Mrs Charmond’s timber. Wishing to energize their ‘understood’ engagement, he calls to see Grace, but she is busy getting dressed for a visit to Mrs Charmond.

Chapter VIII. Grace visits Mrs Charmond in her gloomily placed house and makes a very good impression. Mrs Charmond invites her to be a traveling companion on her planned European tour. Meanwhile, Giles plants fir trees with Marty South.

Chapter IX. Giles invites the Melburys and Grace to a Christmas party in the hope of advancing his unofficial engagement with Grace. But his planning is inept, and they turn up far too early.

Chapter X. The party is a mixture of homespun friendliness and social disasters. Giles is chagrined at his failure to impress Grace, and Mr Melbury is ambivalent about Giles as a partner for his daughter.

Chapter XI. Mr Melbury continues to think that having invested a lot of money in Grace’s education, she could marry somebody socially superior to Giles. Yet his conscience troubles him regarding the debt of honour he feels he owes to Giles’s dead father.

Chapter XII. After being insulted by a passing huntsman, Melbury forbids Grace to meet Giles any more. Mrs Charmond is due to leave on her foreign tour, but has not contacted Grace. Meanwhile, Marty’s father John South is dying.

Chapter XIII. John South is worried that a tall tree in his garden might fall on the house and kill him, so Giles prunes the tree. Grace breaks off their engagement, and Mrs Charmond sets off for Italy, without Grace.

Chapter XIV. John South gets worse, so Dr Fitzpiers insists that the tree be cut down. It is done overnight, so as not to alarm South. But next morning the shock of its disappearance kills him.

Chapter XV. Because of old conditions in the house lease (and his father’s negligence) Giles looses the right to his house, which reverts to Mrs Charmond. Giles accepts that his engagement is no longer possible, just as Grace begins to take a renewed romantic interest in him again.

Chapter XVI. Giles meets Dr Fitzpiers and accepts a ride in his gig. Fitzpiers quizzes him about Grace, who he finds attractive. Giles gives away very little information.

Chapter XVII. Grammer Oliver falls ill and reveals to Grace that she has sold her brain to Dr Fitzpiers for ten pounds. Grace is sent to the doctor to cancel the arrangement. Fitzpiers is deeply bored and frustrated with the stagnant social life in the district.

Chapter XVIII. Grace finds Fitzpiers asleep and leaves. He brings her back and agrees to cancel the arrangement with Grammer Oliver. He shows her a fragment of John South’s brain under a microscope.

Chapter XIX. Fitzpiers plans to marry in his own class, but he is attracted to Grace. He thinks she is a rarity with whom he can temporarily amuse himself. He joins the bark-stripping workers, helps Grace find her lost purse, and learns that she as had an ‘admirer’.

Chapter XX. At the Midsummer”s Eve folk rituals Fitzpiers lays ‘claim’ to Grace, displacing Giles. After this he pursues Suke Damson and spends the night with her.

Chapter XXI. Giles is in retreat from the midsummer celebrations when he meets a mysterious stranger from South Carolina who wants to be directed to Mrs Charmond in secrecy.

Chapter XXII. Melbury visits Fitzpiers and agrees to let him pay court to Grace, based on nothing more than a snobbish regard for the doctor’s family name and reputation.

Chapter XXIII. Melbury pressures Grace to accept Fitzpiers so as to enhance her social status. Fitzpiers is accepted by Grace, but he wants a registry office wedding so as to keep her lower class origins quiet.

Chapter XXIV. Grace sees Suke Damson coming out of Fitzpiers’ house at dawn. When confronted by her, he claims it was an emergency medical visit for a tooth extraction. Grace accepts the explanation, but insists on a church wedding. Her wedding dress arrives – and she is married to Fitzpiers.

Chapter XXV. Returning from her honeymoon, Grace meets Giles at an inn, working his cider press. She is upset by the encounter. Grace and Fitzpiers live with the Melburys, but Fitzpiers thinks they ought not to mix socially with her parents. Mrs Charmond sends for Fitzpiers after a fall from her carriage.

Chapter XXVI. Fitzpiers attends Mrs Charmond, who is not hurt at all. She has sent for him because she is bored. It transpires that they have met before, when Fitzpiers was a student in Heidelberg.

Chapter XXVII. Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond flirt with each other, and he pulls out of the purchase of a medical practice in Budmouth so that he can stay in the vicinity. She decides to go away, but first learns of Giles Winterborne’s plight and feels sympathetic towards him.

Chapter XXVIII. Fitzpiers rides late at night to visit Mrs Charmond in a nearby town. Grace’s suspicions about her husband’s infidelity are confirmed when she meets Giles returning from Middleton Abbey where he has seen both Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond.

Chapter XXIX. Grace learns that Fitzpiers has lied about extracting Suke Damson’s tooth. Fitzpiers stays out until dawn. Grace retreats from him emotionally, and returns into the parental home. Melbury regrets not having stuck to his original plan of marrying Grace to Giles Winterborne.

Chapter XXX. Melbury begins to spy on Fitzpiers and Mrs Charmond on his daughter’s behalf. Grace bears Fitzpiers’ infidelity without jealousy, largely because she has decided that she loves Giles after all.

Chapter XXXI. Melbury discusses his problems with Giles, revealing his sense of guilt about having been disloyal to the memory of Giles’s father, and wishing that Grace had married Giles. It emerges that Mrs Charmond has been an actress.

Chapter XXXII. Melbury goes to see Mrs Charmond and asks her to have pity on Grace, and to befriend her again so as to quash the scandalous rumours about an illicit relationship with Fitzpiers.

Chapter XXXIII. Grace meets Mrs Charmond in the woods. They argue about Fitzpiers, and Grace predicts that Mrs Charmond will suffer from her love with Fitzpiers. They both get lost in the woods, then find each other again. Mrs Charmond confesses that she loves Fitzpiers and that they are lovers.

Chapter XXXIV. Grace goes to visit friends and falls ill. Her father follows Fitzpiers when he goes to visit Mrs Charmond, but doesn’t get a chance to reproach him for neglecting Grace. Fitzpiers falls off his horse in the dark and is rescued by his father-in-law.

Chapter XXXV. Whilst on Melbury’s horse, Fitzpiers is befuddled by the rum Melbury has given him. He ‘confesses’ his wish to be free to claim Mrs Charmond. Melbury pushes him off his horse, whereupon he bangs his head. Hearing that Fitzpiers has had an accident, Grace, Suke Damson, and Mrs Charmond all assemble in Fitzpiers’ bedroom at the house – but he does not come back home.

Chapter XXXVI. Fitzpiers, his head bleeding, retreats to Mrs Charmond’s house, where she hides him in her attic. He makes plans to ‘disappear’ from Hintock altogether.

Chapter XXXVII. Fitzpiers leaves Hintock, followed closely by Mrs Charmond, and they are later reportedly seen together in Baden. Melbury hears that easier divorce is now possible, and goes to London to arrange a termination of Grace’s and Fitzpiers’ relationship. He also rather precipitately encourages both Giles and Grace to recommence their romance.

Chapter XXXVIII. Giles and Grace meet in Sherton. They re-open their relationship in the Abbey, but are both cautious regarding Grace’s legal position. Giles then blunders socially by ordering her lunch in a workman’s tavern.

Chapter XXXIX. Back in Hintock Giles and Grace are both worried that they might be doing the wrong thing morally. Then Giles gets a letter telling him that the divorce application has failed. He does not reveal this to Grace and accepts her invitation to kiss her. Melbury returns from London with the news that Grace must remain wife to Fitzpiers.

Chapter XL. Three months later, Giles is ill. Grace receives a letter from Fitzpiers asking her to meet at the coast and return with him to France. She refuses, so he comes back to Hintock, where Melbury is prepared to accept him. Grace flees the house and goes to Giles for help.

Chapter XLI. Grace wants to go to the house of a friend, but rain drives them back. She stays in Giles’s cottage whilst he sleeps in a lean-to shelter in the pouring rain. They decide that Grace should hide there. Autumn storms and rain arrive, but Giles remains outside to protect her social reputation.

Chapter XLII. Giles does not appear one morning, and by nightfall Grace is driven out to find him in a delirious state in his shelter. She puts him to bed, then goes to summon the nearest doctor – who is Fitzpiers.

Chapter XLIII. Fitzpiers arrives at the cottage and confirms that Giles is dying – which he does. Grace lets Fitzpiers believe that she has been living in the cottage with Giles as lovers. He reveals to her that Mrs Charmond is dead. [She was shot by a jealous lover.] Marty South appears, and the two women pray for Giles. Mr and Mrs Melbury arrive and take Grace back home – on her condition that Fitzpiers leaves.

Chapter XLIV. Grace and Marty visit Giles’s grave, and Fitzpiers visits Hintock, learning from Marty the truth about Grace’s occupation of the cottage.

Chapter XLV. Some months later Fitzpiers writes to Grace asking to see her again. When they meet he wants to be forgiven and live together again. She does not accede to the idea, and asks her father for advice. He says she is better off without Fitzpiers.

Chapter XLVI. Fitzpiers visits Grace in her garden and presses his case again. She tells him she will remain loyal to the memory of Giles. Meanwhile Tom Tangs is suspicious of Suke’s interest in Fitzpiers, and wishes to strike back against him on the eve of his departure for New Zealand.

Chapter XLVII. Tangs sets a huge man-trap for Fitzpiers on the night he is due to visit Grace. But Grace’s skirt is caught in it when she gets to the spot first. Fitzpiers has bought into a medical practice in the midlands with money from an inheritance. He presses his argument for reconciliation harder than ever.

Chapter XLVIII. Grace submits and returns to Sherton with Fitzpiers. Melbury goes with friends in search of his daughter and finds her at the inn. On their return to Hintock, they pass Marty who is tending Giles’ grave alone, now ‘united’ with the man she loved.

Hardy’s study

reconstructed in Dorchester museum

The Woodlanders – bibliography

John Bayley, ‘A Social Comedy’ On Re-Reading The Woodlanders, Thomas Hardy Annual, 5 (1987), 3-21.

Penny Boumelha, ‘The Patriarchy of Class: Under the Greenwood Tree, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Woodlanders‘. in Dale Kramer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 130-44.

Peter Casagrande Jr., ‘The Shifted “Centre of Altruism” in The Woodlanders: Thomas Hardy’s Third “Return of the Native”‘, Journal of English Literary History 38 (1971), 104-25.

Annette Frederico, ‘Pathalogical Gentlemen: Far from the Madding Crowd and The Woodlanders‘, in her Masculine Identity in Hardy and Gissing (London and Toronto, Associated University Presses, 1991), 55-75.

Frank R. Giordano, ‘The Martyrdom of Giles Winterborne’, Thoma Hardy Annual, 2 (1984), 61-78.

Patricia Ingham, ‘Introduction’, in Thomas Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. P. Ingham (London: Penguin, 1998).

Mary Jacobus, ‘Tree and Machine: The Woodlanders‘, in Dale Kramer (ed.), Critical Approaches in the Fiction of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1979), 116-34.

Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan 1982).

Jane Thomas, Thomas Hardy, Femininity and Dissent: Reassessing the Minor Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999).

Hardy’s WESSEX

The Woodlanders – further reading

John Bayley, An Essay on Hardy, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Penny Boumelha, Thomas Hardy and Women: Sexual Ideology and Narrative Form, Brighton: Harvester, 1982.

Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1982.

L. St.J. Butler, Alternative Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1989.

Raymond Chapman, The Language of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1990.

R.G.Cox, Thomas Hardy: The Critical Heritage, London: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1970.

Ralph W.V. Elliot, Thomas Hardy’s English, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1984.

James Gibson (ed), The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, London, 1976.

Florence Emily Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy, London: Macmillan, 1962. (This is more or less Hardy’ s autobiography, since he told his wife what to write.)

P. Ingham, Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading, Brighton: Harvester, 1989.

P.Ingham, The Language of Class and Gender: Transformation in the English Novel, London: Routledge, 1995,

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, London: Bodley Head, 1971.

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006. (This is the definitive biography.)

Michael Millgate and Richard L. Purdy (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-

R. Morgan, Women and Sexuality in the Novels of Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge, 1988.

Harold Orel (ed), Thomas Hardy’s Personal Writings, London, 1967.

F.B. Pinion, A Thomas Hardy Companion, London: Macmillan, 1968.

Norman Page, Thomas Hardy, London: Routledge & Keegan Paul, 1977.

Rosemary Sumner, Thomas Hardy: Psychological Novelist, London: Macmillan, 1981.

Richard H. Taylor, The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy, London, 1978.

Merryn Williams, A Preface to Hardy, London: Longman, 1976.

Other works by Thomas Hardy

Buy the book at Amazon UK
Buy the book at Amazon US

Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

The Years

December 6, 2013 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, commentary, study resources, plot, and web links

The Years (1937) was the largest of Virginia Woolf’s novels. Its focus is the passage of time as it traces the Pargiter family history from 1880 up to the ‘Present Day’. The novel met with high praise when it was first published. David Garnett said the book “marks her as the greatest master of English” and is “the finest novel she has ever written” (New Statesman & Nation). Subsequent critical assessments have been more mixed. The novel sold very well in England and America making its way on to American best-seller lists.

Elizabeth Willson Gordon, Woolf’s-head Publishing: The Highlights and New Lights of the Hogarth Press

central London

The Years – critical commentary

In 1922 Virginia Woolf broke with the conventions of traditional prose fiction in her experimental novel Jacob’s Room. This involved abandoning plot and suspense; adopting a shifting point of view; and creating a discontinuous narrative which switched from one character and location to another, with few marks of transition or causality in between.

The same techniques are at work in The Years, but the sense of fragmentation and the lack of unity is exacerbated by the fact that Woolf cut whole swathes out of her original composition – leaving enormous gaps between the ‘chapters’ or ‘sections’ of the novel in which events are left unrecorded and unexplained.

We know from Woolf’s original manuscript of the novel (when it was called The Pargiters: A Novel-Essay) that this is the most heavily edited and revised of all her novels. As Mitchell Leaska points out in his introduction to the published manuscript version:

many parts of the novel are highly ambiguous. Throughout the published text of The Years we come across splinters of memory, fragments of speech, titles of quoted passages left un-named or forgotten, lines of poetry or remnants of nursery rhymes left dangling in mid-air, understanding between characters incomplete, and utterances missing the mark and misunderstood. In one sense the novel eloquently communicates the failure of communication.

The reader is able to reassemble some sense of what has happened in those gaps by piecing together hints that are dropped in the remaining sections – but it has to be said that one of the weaknesses of The Years is that the narrative offers very little incentive for this effort to be made.

There is quite a bewildering array of characters, and keeping track of them is not made any easier by the fact that many of them are known by their pet names or nicknames. Magdalena is known as Maggie, Sally as Sara, and Nicholas Pomjalovsky is called Brown. It is interesting to note that the only character who appears all the way through the novel and provides some sense of continuity is Eleanor, who is not given a nickname.

There are also characters who appear in the narrative, assume a certain importance in the events of the section (or chapter) in which they appear – only to disappear and never be mentioned again. This might well reflect the facts of social life as we experience it, but it does not make for a very compelling work of literary art.

There are other problems too. We know that uppermost in Woolf’s mind during the composition of the novel were issues of women’s roles in society – materials for which she wisely cut out of the novel and eventually found their way into Three Guineas. But having cut them out, the novel is curiously denuded of political content.

The section entitled 1914 ends with a rhapsodic scene of Kitty wallowing in her sense of ownership on her family estate ‘in the North’ – with absolutely no mention of the catastrophe about to engulf Europe – which we know to have been an active concern for society at the time.

It might be argued that the character’s lack of awareness is a criticism of upper-class complacency in the face of international power-politics – but unfortunately the same thing is true of the final section of the novel Present Day in which the whole family assembles for a party in 1937 without any mention of the second catastrophe into which Europe was sliding. This is at best curious and at worst a serious flaw – especially when we know that Woolf herself lived in a milieu in which international politics was an active and regular subject of debate.

Authors are not obliged to use their own lives for the material of their fictions of course, and it could be argued that Woof is showing a typical upper-class family in all its privilege and neglect – but there is very little sense of criticism within the text.

The Years – study resources

The Years – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Oxford World Classics edition – Amazon US

The Years – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Wordsworth Classics edition – Amazon US

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon UK

The Years – Vintage Classics edition – Amazon US

Virginia Woolf – biographical notes

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia – biographical notes, links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex – tutorials, web links, study resources

The Years – plot summary

1880. Colonel Pargiter leaves his club in Piccadilly and visits his mistress in Westminster. Then he goes home and joins his children for afternoon tea. His daughter Delia goes upstairs to visit her mother who is an invalid, whilst another daughter Rose defies house rules and goes out to the shops. Later, whilst the family are having dinner, Mrs Pargiter has a fainting fit, and there is a general feeling that she is dying. That evening Rose is frightened by the image of a man she has seen exposing himself in the street.

At Oxford University Edward Pargiter is cramming for an examination in Greek. He share a gift of port with two fellow undergraduates Hugh Gibbs and Ashley. Kitty Malone (a relative of the Pargiters) goes to a history lesson with Lucy Craddock, then has tea with the poorer Robsons, which she enjoys compared with the stiffness of college life. News arrives of Mrs Pargiter’s death, and both branches of the family take part in the funeral service, which is viewed sceptically by Delia.

1891. Eleven years later Milly Pargiter has married Hugh Gibbs. Eleanor is running the family home for her ageing father and supervising repair works on the lodgings of the poor. She has lunch with her father then goes to the law courts to watch her brother Morris try a case, but she leaves feeling oppressed by the atmosphere in court. In the busy London streets, learning that Parnell has died, she visits her sister Delia in a poor rooming house – but she is not at home.

Colonel Partiger is in town on the same day, having ended his relationship with Maria. He visits the home of his brother Digby and sister-in-law Eugenie, feeling envious of Digby’s domestic comforts.

1907. Sir Digby and Lady Eugenia Pargiter are on their way to a summer evening party with their daughter Magdalena (Maggie). Whilst they are out their very imaginative younger daughter Sara (Sally) lies in bed listening to the sounds of a dance in a house nearby, turning over philosophic concepts of being and reading Edward Pargiter’s translation of Antigone.

Her sister and mother return late at night and the young girls pester their mother for romantic anecdotes about her younger life.

1908. A year later Sir Digby and Lady Eugenia Pargiter have both died. Martin Pargiter, back from India and Africa, visits their house, which has been closed and sold. He then visits Eleanor and his father, who has had a stroke. Rose visits from her suffragette work in the North. The siblings resurrect memories of childhood.

1910. Rose, now forty, visits her cousins Maggie and Sara who live in poor ‘rooms’ in a working class area south of the river. They compare memories of childhood and their respective families. After lunch, Rose takes Sara to a political meeting in Holborn where Eleanor is the secretary. It is also attended by Kitty (Lady Lasswade) who afterwards is driven to the opera (Siegfried) where she is joined by her cousin Edward, who is still a bachelor.

Maggie and Sara finish their dinner, after which Sara gives a slightly dotty but accurate account of the meeting. Their neighbourhood is full of noise and drunks, and the section ends with the announcement that Edward VII has died.

1911. Old Colonel Pargiter has died. Eleanor, now fifty-five, returns from a trip to Mediterranean countries to visit Morris at his mother-in-law’s house in Dorset, where she meets an old friend Sir William Whatney. She wonders what to do with her life now that she has no more domestic responsibilities.

1913. Eleanor sells the family house, and Crosby the housekeeper retires to Richmond. However, she still looks after Martin’s laundry. He lives in Ebury Street, Belgravia and is still not married.

1914. Martin leaves home and walks towards the city where he is due to see his stockbrokers, wondering what he might have been had he not been in the army. At St Paul’s he meets Sally and takes her for lunch to a very crowded chop house. She gets tipsy, then rather cryptic and mystical in her conversation. Afterwards they take a bus, then walk through Hyde Park into Kensington Gardens where she is due to meet Maggie. Martin confides in Maggie about a woman with whom he is unhappily in love.

In the evening he goes to a formal dinner party given by Kitty in Grosvenor Square. He is bored by the extremely stiff and lifeless conventions of upper-class society, but he does what is expected of him. He and Kitty both claim to be interested in each other, but do nothing about it.

After the guests leave Kitty changes and is driven to the station where she catches the night train for the family estate in the ‘North’. She arrives in the very early morning, and after breakfast goes for a walk on the estate, feeling an ecstatic bond with the countryside and a sense of continuity and ownership, even though she knows that the estate will pass into the hands of her eldest son.

1917. Eleanor goes to dinner with Maggie and Renny in Westminster where she meets the gay Pole, Nicholas. They are joined by Sara who rapidly becomes tipsy. When an air raid starts, they move down into the cellar and continue dinner there. Various responses to the war are expressed in fragments of unfinished conversation. After the raid is over the visitors leave and rejoin the almost empty streets where traffic is beginning to circulate again

1918. An ageing and ailing Crosby is shopping in Richmond, clinging on to the last domestic position that separates her from poverty.

Present Day. Eleanor, now in her seventies, has been to India. Her nephew North returns from sheep farming in Africa to visit Sara, having been impressed by Nicholas . They discuss their previous correspondence and have a low class dinner where she boards. Eleanor and Peggy (who is now a doctor) travel to Delia’s house to a party, their fragments of conversation reflecting links to the past and differences in generations within the family.

North and Sara exchange their enthusiasm for poetry and anti-Semitism whilst waiting to go to the party. They are joined by Renny and Maggie. At the party Peggy has to politely endure boring stories from her uncle, whilst she is quietly reflecting on what we can know about other people. The younger Pargiters (now in their sixties and seventies) meet and tease each other about incidents in their shared childhood.

North feels an outsider’s rage against the stiff social conventions and views the party as degenerate animals which ought to be destroyed. Eleanor meanwhile tries to make sense of the long life she has lived, but in the end she falls asleep.

Eleanor eventually feels that she finds happiness simply being amongst younger living people. Peggy on the other hand is painfully conscious of the hardships and misery in life. She criticises North in an unprovoked attack. North feels himself completely alienated, and sees the guests as a middle and upper-class club to which he does not belong.

North meets his uncle Edward and admires him for what seems to be his attitude of being above the mediocre mass, and he wishes to find some new way of being for himself. Nicholas tries to make a speech of thanks to the hostess, but he cannot command attention. Finally, as dawn breaks over the square, the party comes to an end and the guests begin to go home.

The Years – principal characters

Colonel Abel Pargiter	head of the family, with two fingers missing
Rose Pargiter	his invalid wife, who dies
Eleanor Pargiter	the eldest daughter (‘no beauty’) who does charity work
Milly Pargiter	daughter
Rose	daughter, imaginative suffragette and spinster
Martin	son, who joins the army
Morris	son, apprentice at law, who becomes a barrister
Edward	Oxford university classics scholar
Dr Malone	an Oxford Don
Rose Malone	his wife, Rose Pargiter’s cousin
Kitty	his large daughter, later Lady Lasswade
Lucy Craddock	Kitty’s private history tutor
Celia	Morris’s wife, Eleanor’s sister-in-law
Sir Digby Pargiter	Colonel Pargiter’s younger brother
Eugenie	his wife
Magdalena (Maggie)	his daughter
Sally (Sara)	his daughter
René (Renny)	a Frenchman
Nicholas Pomjalovsky (Brown)	a gay Pole
North	Morris’s son, Eleanor’s nephew
Crosby	the Pargiter’s housekeeper
Mira	Colonel Pargiter’s mistress

The Years – further reading

Charles Hoffmann, ‘Virginia Woolf’s Manuscript Revisions of The Years‘, PMLA 84 (1969), 78-89.

Mitchell A. Leaska, ‘Virginia Woolf, the Parteger: A Reading of The Years‘, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 172-210.

Mitchell A. Leaska (ed.) The Partigers by Virginia Woolf: The Novel-Essay Portion of ‘The Years’ (London: Hogarth Press, 1978).

Jane Marcus, ‘The Years as Greek Drama, Domestic Novel and Gotterdamerung’, Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 176-301.

Victoria Middleton, ‘The Years: “A Deliberate Failure”‘ Bulletin of the New York Public Library, 80/2 (1977), 158-71.

Madeline Moore, ‘The Years and Years of Adverse Male Reviewers’, Women’s Studies 4 (1977), 247-63.

Grace Radin, ‘I am not a hero: Virginia Woolf and the First Version of The Years‘, Massachussetts Review, 16 (1975), 195-208.

Grace Radin, Virginia Woolf’s The Years: The Evolution of a Novel (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981).

Eric Warner, ‘Reconsidering The Years‘, North Dakota Quarterly, 48/2 (1980), 16-30.

First edition – cover design by Vanessa Bell

The Years – textual history

The novel we now know as The Years has an extremely complicated genesis – both in conception and execution. The first glimmerings of its birth appeared in 1931 when Virginia Woolf delivered a speech to the London branch of the National Society for Women’s Service, an organisation which dealt with employment for women. It was entitled ‘Professions for Women’ and dealt with her own experiences as a writer. She contrasts the comparative ease of her own entry into the world of letters with the heroic efforts of Ethel Smyth the composer:

She is of the race of the pioneers: She is among the ice-breakers, the window-smashers, the indomitable and the irresistible armoured tanks who climbed the rough ground; went first; drew the enemy’s fire; and left a pathway for those who came after her.

During the two years that followed, Woolf was doing the reading and research for what would eventually become both The Years and Three Guineas, but at first these formed one work in her mind. In October 1932 she began work on The Partigers: A Novel-Essay. Her plan was to alternate ‘extracts’ from the novel with essays offering critical commentary on the fictional narratives. The subject of the novel was to be what we now call a ‘family saga’ covering the lives of the Partiger family between 1880 and 2023.

By January 1933 she had completed the first part of the book, which deals with the year 1880 – and it is interesting to note that the essay portions come before the fictional chapters. But a month later, having decided that this formal construction made the work too much like propaganda, she decided to leave out the intervening essays. This material was not lost however: it was to form the basis of what eventually became Three Guineas.

For the next two years she produced 200,000 words of a novel for which she didn’t even have a title. It was at various stages called Here and Now, Music, Dawn, Sons and Daughters, Daughters and Sons, Ordinary People, The Caravan, and Other People’s Houses, before she eventually settled on The Years.

Next came the task of editing down this mass of material into what would be a single publishable volume. She did this by a process of ruthless pruning and simply leaving out explanatory passages, so that the narrative jumps from one character and scene to another with no smooth transitions. Even so, the typescript still came to 740 pages. She did all this editing and re-typing work herself, and the book put a great strain on her fragile mental and physical health. She described it as the novel which almost killed her.

But there was more work to be done. She wanted the work printed in galley proofs before she allowed her final judge, husband Leonard, to read the novel: these proofs amounted to 600 sheets. The strain of all this, the indecision, and the fact that she had been paid in advance by her American publishers, put an enormous strain on her fragile state, and led to a severe illness which lasted three months. Leonard gave his guarded approval to the results, knowing that any censure from him would lead to her complete breakdown.

When she returned to editing the proofs she cut out what she described as ‘two enormous chunks’ (fifty pages of the current OUP text). When the final proofs appeared, one set was edited for the American market and the other for the Woolf’s own Hogarth Press. There are even differences between these two sets of revisions – but relatively minor.

After all this indecision, anguish, and revision, The Years was quite successful on publication, and in America even became a best seller. By the end of 1938 the novel had earned her £4,000, which in contemporary terms is worth between £300,000 and £400,000.

Virginia Woolf’s writing

“I feel certain that I am going mad again.”

Other works by Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of her late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a tryptich of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis. The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.
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Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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Kew Gardens is a collection of experimental short stories in which Woolf tested out ideas and techniques which she then later incorporated into her novels. After Chekhov, they represent the most important development in the modern short story as a literary form. Incident and narrative are replaced by evocations of mood, poetic imagery, philosophic reflection, and subtleties of composition and structure. The shortest piece, ‘Monday or Tuesday’, is a one-page wonder of compression. This collection is a cornerstone of literary modernism. No other writer – with the possible exception of Nadine Gordimer, has taken the short story as a literary genre as far as this.
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Virginia Woolf is a readable and well illustrated biography by John Lehmann, who at one point worked as her assistant and business partner at the Hogarth Press. It is described by the blurb as ‘A critical biography of Virginia Woolf containing illustrations that are a record of the Bloomsbury Group and the literary and artistic world that surrounded a writer who is immensely popular today’. This is an attractive and very accessible introduction to the subject which has been very popular with readers ever since it was first published..
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Virginia Woolf – web links

Virginia Woolf at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major works, book reviews, studies of the short stories, bibliographies, web links, study resources.

Blogging Woolf
Book reviews, Bloomsbury related issues, links, study resources, news of conferences, exhibitions, and events, regularly updated.

Virginia Woolf at Wikipedia
Full biography, social background, interpretation of her work, fiction and non-fiction publications, photograph albumns, list of biographies, and external web links

Virginia Woolf at Gutenberg
Selected eTexts of the novels The Voyage Out, Night and Day, Jacob’s Room, and the collection of stories Monday or Tuesday in a variety of digital formats.

Woolf Online
An electronic edition and commentary on To the Lighthouse with notes on its composition, revisions, and printing – plus relevant extracts from the diaries, essays, and letters.

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search texts of all the major novels and essays, word by word – locate quotations, references, and individual terms

Virginia Woolf – a timeline in phtographs
A collection of well and lesser-known photographs documenting Woolf’s life from early childhood, through youth, marriage, and fame – plus some first edition book jackets – to a soundtrack by Philip Glass. They capture her elegant appearance, the big hats, and her obsessive smoking. No captions or dates, but well worth watching.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury – including Gordon Square, Gower Street, Bedford Square, Tavistock Square, plus links to women’s history web sites.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
Bulletins of events, annual lectures, society publications, and extensive links to Woolf and Bloomsbury related web sites

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
Charming sound recording of radio talk given by Virginia Woolf in 1937 – a podcast accompanied by a slideshow of photographs.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephen compiled a photograph album and wrote an epistolary memoir, known as the “Mausoleum Book,” to mourn the death of his wife, Julia, in 1895 – an archive at Smith College – Massachusetts

Virginia Woolf first editions
Hogarth Press book jacket covers of the first editions of Woolf’s novels, essays, and stories – largely designed by her sister, Vanessa Bell.

Virginia Woolf – on video
Biographical studies and documentary videos with comments on Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group and the social background of their times.

Virginia Woolf Miscellany
An archive of academic journal essays 2003—2014, featuring news items, book reviews, and full length studies.

More on Virginia Woolf
Virginia Woolf – web links
Virginia Woolf – greatest works
Virginia Woolf – criticism
More on the Bloomsbury Group

Thomas Hardy greatest works

September 30, 2009 by Roy Johnson

major novels and film adaptations

Thomas Hardy is one of the few writers (D.H.Lawrence was another) who made a significant contribution to English literature in the form of the novel, poetry, and the short story. His writing is full of delightful effects, beautiful images and striking language. He creates unforgettable characters and orchestrates stories which pull at your heart strings. It has to be said that he also relies on coincidences and improbabilities of plot which (though common in the nineteenth century) some people see as weaknesses. However, his sense of drama, his powerful language, and his wonderful depiction of the English countryside make him an enduring favourite.

Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) was Hardy’s first success as a novelist. It’s a light and gentle evocation of pastoral life. It depicts the world of an agricultural Britain which Hardy saw being transformed by the industrial revolution. Modern readers might find the love interest a bit soppy, but the picture of the Melchester church musicians and their resistance to change is touchingly humorous. It enabled Hardy to express his affection and love for the Wessex countryside. Structurally divided into Winter, Spring, Summer, Autumn, it follows the natural rhythms of the earth and of rural society. There’s none of the acute conflict, the psychological drama, or the tragedy of the later novels. This is one for either the complete beginner to Hardy, or for devotees who wish to flesh out their knowledge of the early stages of his career.
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Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was the first of Hardy’s novels to apply the name of Wessex to the landscape of south west England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity as a novelist. Heroine and estate-owner Bathsheba Everdene is romantically involved with three very different men. The dashing Sergeant Troy, who is handsome but unreliable; Farmer Boldwood, who is honourable but middle-aged; and man-of-the-soil Gabriel Oak, who is worthy and prepared to bide his time. The conflicts between them and the ensuing drama has lots of plot twists plus a rich picture of rural life.
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Far from the Madding Crowd – DVD John Schlesinger’s film adaptation (1967) has an outstanding sound track by Richard Rodney Bennett, and stalwart performances from an all star cast of Julie Christie as Bathsheba, Alan Bates as Gabriel Oak, Terence Stamp as Sergeant Troy, and Peter Finch as Boldwood – plus delicious a country bumpkin role for Freddy Jones. The film was shot by Nicolas Roeg (director of his own films Don’t Look Now and Bad Timing) and the screenplay was written by novelist Frederic Raphael. This film is a visual treat which has stood the test of time.
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The Return of the Native (1878) It’s often said that this is one of the most Hardyesque of all the novels. There are some stand-out characters: Eustacia Vye, a heroine who patrols the moors looking out for her man through a telescope; Clym Yeobright, a hero who can’t escape his mother’s influence; and Diggory Ven, an itinerant trader who wanders in and out of the story covered in red dye. Improbable coincidences and dramatic ironies abound – and over it all presides the brooding presence of Egdon Heath. But underneath the melodrama, there are profound psychological forces at work. You need to be patient. This is one for Hardy enthusiasts – not beginners. This edition, unlike any other currently available, retains the text of the novel’s first edition, without the later changes that substantially altered Hardy’s original intentions.
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The Oxford World Classics are the best editions of Hardy’s work. They are largely based on the most accurate versions of the texts; and they feature introductory essays, a biography, explanatory notes, textual variants, a bibliography of further reading, and in some cases missing or deleted chapters. They are also terrifically good value.

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) is probably Hardy’s greatest work – a novel whose aspirations are matched by artistic shaping and control. It is the tragic history of Michael Henchard – a man who rises to civic prominence, but whose past comes back to haunt him. This is not surprising, because he sells his wife in the opening chapter. When she comes back unexpectedly, he is trapped between present and past. He is also locked into a psychological contest with an alter-ego figure with whom he battles both metaphorically and realistically. Henchard falls in the course of the novel from civic honour and commercial greatness into a tragic figure, a man defeated by his own strengths as much as his weaknesses. There are strong echoes of King Lear here, and some of the most dramatic and psychologically revealing scenes in all of Hardy’s work.
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The Well Beloved (1892) is set in the stone quarries of Portland Bill – one of the strangest parts of Hardy’s Wessex. But the logical link is with the sculptor hero of this tale who rather improbably falls in love with a woman, her daughter, and her grand-daughter at twenty year intervals on the implausible pretext that they look similar. This seems like blatant authorial wish-fulfilment on Hardy’s part (and he did eventually marry a woman forty years his junior). It’s one for specialists – or the psychiatrist’s couch. This Penguin Classics edition of the work includes an earlier version of the same novel.
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Tess: DVD Roman Polanski’s film version of Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1979) was shot in Brittany rather than England – to get round the extradition laws between the UK and the US from which he has been in exile since 1977, after jumping bail when charged with raping a 13 year old girl. It is beautifully faithful to the original novel and particularly unsparing in its depiction of country life as hard manual work – which would have pleased Hardy. The centrepiece is an outstanding performance by seventeen year old Natassia Kinski (Klaus Kinski’s daughter) who was Polanski’s lover at the time. She is astoundingly beautiful without seeming to ever realise it, which is exactly one of the causes of Tess’s downfall in the novel.
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Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s last major statement before he gave up writing novels for good. Hero Jude is intellectually ambitious but held back by his work as stonemason and his dalliance with earthy Arabella. When he meets his spiritual soulmate Sue Brideshead, everything seems set fair for success – except that she is capricious and sexually repressed. Jude struggles to do the right thing – but the Fates are against him. The outcome is heart-rendingly bleak and tragic. This novel reveals the deep-seated social and sexual tensions in Hardy – himself a self-made man from a humble background.
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The Complete Critical Guide to Thomas Hardy is a good introduction to Thomas Hardy criticism. It includes a potted biography of Hardy, an outline of the stories, novels, and poetry, and pointers towards the main critical writings – from the early influential full length study by D.H. Lawrence to critics of the present day. It also includes a thorough bibliography which covers biography, criticism in books and articles, plus pointers towards specialist Hardy journals. Recommended for anyone making a serious study of Hardy.
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The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Hardy offers commissioned essays from an international team of contributors, comprising a general overview of all Hardy’ s work and specific demonstrations of Hardy’s ideas and literary skills. Individual essays explore Hardy’s biography, aesthetics, his famous attachment to Wessex, and the impact on his work of developments in science, religion and philosophy in the late nineteenth century. Hardy’s writing is also analysed against developments in contemporary critical theory and issues such as sexuality and gender. The volume also contains a detailed chronology of Hardy’s life and publications, and a guide to further reading.
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Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

Thomas Hardy web links

December 8, 2010 by Roy Johnson

a selection of web-based archives and resources

This short selection of Thomas Hardy web links offers quick connections to resources for further study. It’s not comprehensive, and if you have any ideas for additional resources, please use the ‘Comments’ box below to make suggestions.

Thomas Hardy – web links

Thomas Hardy at Mantex
Biographical notes, study guides to the major novels, book reviews. bibliographies, critiques of the shorter fiction, and web links.

The Thomas Hardy Collection
The complete novels, stories, and poetry – Kindle eBook single file download for £1.29 at Amazon.

Thomas Hardy at Project Gutenberg
A major collection of free eTexts in a variety of digital formats.

Thomas Hardy at Wikipedia
Biographical notes, social background, the novels and literary themes, poetry, religious beliefs and influence, biographies and criticism.

The Thomas Hardy Society
Dorset-based site featuring educational activities, a biennial conference, a journal (three times a year) with links to the texts of all the major works.

The Thomas Hardy Association
American-based site with photos and academic resources. Be prepared to search and drill down to reach the more useful materials.

Thomas Hardy – online literary criticism
Small collection of academic papers and articles ‘favoring signed articles by recognized scholars and articles published in peer-reviewed sources’.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex
Evolution of Wessex, contemporary reviews, maps, bibliography, links to other web sites, and history.

More on Thomas Hardy
More on the novella
More on literary studies
More on short stories

To the Lighthouse

January 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

tutorial, characters, criticism, resource materials

To the Lighthouse (1927) is the second of the twin jewels in the crown of Virginia Woolf’s late experimental phase. It is concerned with the passage of time, the nature of human consciousness, and the process of artistic creativity. Woolf substitutes symbolism and poetic prose for any notion of plot, and the novel is composed as a triptych of three almost static scenes – during the second of which the principal character Mrs Ramsay dies – literally within a parenthesis.

The writing is lyrical and philosophical at the same time. Many critics see this as her greatest achievement, and Woolf herself realised that with this book she was taking the novel form into hitherto unknown territory.

Virginia Woolf

To the Lighthouse – plot summary

Part I: The Window
The novel is set in the Ramsays’ summer home in the Hebrides, on the Isle of Skye. [*] Part I begins just before the start of World War I. Mrs Ramsay assures her six year old son James that they should be able to visit a lighthouse across the bay next day. This prediction is denied by Mr Ramsay, who voices his certainty that the weather will not be clear. This attitude creates a certain tension between Mr and Mrs Ramsay, and also between Mr Ramsay and James. The incident is referred to on various occasions throughout the chapter.

The Ramsays have been joined at the house by a number of friends and colleagues. Lily Briscoe is a young painter attempting a portrayal of Mrs. Ramsay and her son James. She finds herself plagued by doubts throughout the novel, doubts largely fed by the statements of Charles Tansley, another guest, claiming that women can neither paint nor write. Tansley himself is an admirer of Mr Ramsay and his philosophical treatises. During the course of the afternoon, another guest Paul Rayley proposes to Minta Doyle, Lily begins her painting, Mrs. Ramsay soothes the resentful James, and Mr. Ramsay frets over his shortcomings as a philosopher, periodically turning to Mrs. Ramsay for comfort.

The section closes with a large dinner party which is fraught with minor tensions. Mr Ramsay nearly snaps at Augustus Carmichael, a visiting poet, when he asks for a second serving of soup. Mrs Ramsay, who is striving for the perfect dinner party is herself out of sorts when Paul and Minta arrive late to dinner, as Minta lost her grandmother’s brooch on the beach.

[* This Scottish location is completely unconvincing. The setting is clearly modelled on St Ives in Cornwall where Woolf spent all her childhood summer holidays.]

Part II: Time Passes
The second section is a lyrical interlude which gives a sense of time passing, absence, and death. During this period World War I breaks out in Europe. Mrs Ramsay passes away, her daughter Prue dies from complications of childbirth, and her son Andrew is killed in the war. Mr Ramsay is left adrift without his wife to praise and comfort him during his bouts of fear and his anguish regarding the longevity of his philosophical work.

The house itself is neglected during this period, and falls into a state of disrepair. Ten years pass before the family and their friends return for another holiday. Mrs McNab, the housekeeper, employs a few other women to help set the house in order.

Part III: The Lighthouse
Mr Ramsay finally plans on taking the long-delayed trip to the lighthouse with his son James and daughter Cam(illa). The trip almost does not happen, as the children are not ready, but they eventually set off. En route, the children resent their father for forcing them to come along. But James keeps the sailing boat steady, and rather than receiving the harsh words he has come to expect from his father, he hears praise, providing a rare moment of empathy between father and son; Cam’s attitude towards her father has changed as well.

Whilst they visit the lighthouse, Lily attempts to complete her long-unfinished painting. She reconsiders her memory of Mrs Ramsay, grateful for her help in pushing Lily to continue with her art, yet at the same time she struggles to free herself from the tacit control Mrs Ramsay had over other aspects of her life. Upon finishing the painting and seeing that it satisfies her, she realizes that the execution of her vision is more important to her than the idea of leaving some sort of legacy in her work – a lesson Mr Ramsay has yet to learn.

Study resources

To the Lighthouse – Oxford World Classics – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Wordsworth Classics – Amazon US

The Cambridge Introduction to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Complete Works of Virginia Woolf – Kindle edition – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – eBook edition

To the Lighthouse – 1983 dramatisation on DVD – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – audio book (unabridged) – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse: A Reader’s Guide – critical study – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – York Notes (Advanced) – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Macmillan Master Guides – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Penguin Critical Guide – Amazon UK

To the Lighthouse – Palgrave Master Guides – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – Authors in Context – Amazon UK

Selected Essays – by Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

The Cambridge Companion to Virginia Woolf – Amazon UK

Virginia Woolf – biography

part of biographical documentary

Principal characters

Mr Ramsay	a prominent metaphysical philosopher
Mrs Ramsay	his dutiful, beautiful, and loving wife
James Ramsay	their youngest son
Lily Briscoe	a young and single painter
Paul Rayley	a young friend of the Ramsays
Minta Doyle	a friend of the Ramsays who marries Paul
Charles Tansley	a young philosophy pupil of Mr Ramsay’s
William Bankes	a botanist and old friend of the Ramsays
Augustus Carmichael	opium-using poet visitor
Mrs McNab	the Ramsay’s elderly housekeeper
Andrew Ramsay	the eldest son, who is killed during the war
Jasper Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s sons
Roger Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s sons
Prue Ramsay	the eldest daughter, who dies in childbirth
Rose Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s daughters
Nancy Ramsay	one of the Ramsay’s daughters
Cam(illa) Ramsay	the youngest Ramsay daughter

To the Lighthouse – first edition

Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927) Cover design by Vanessa Bell.

“Advance sales totaled over 1,600 copies, more than twice the number for Mrs Dalloway. Virginia’s mood at the time expressed itself in her gaily ironic joke with Vita Sackville-West. When Vita returned from her second trip to Persia, she found a copy of To the Lighthouse waiting for her, inscribed by Virginia, “In my opinion the best novel I have ever written”. It was a bound dummy copy, with blank pages. Leonard Woolf, anticipating both an artistic and a commercial success for To the Lighthouse, ordered 3,000 copies printed by R. & R. Clark (a thousand more than Mrs Dalloway) and quickly ordered another 1,000 copies in a second impression. The novel outsold her previous fiction. The American publisher of Hogarth Press books, Harcourt Brace, printed 4,000 copies initially (almost twice the number of copies for Mrs Dalloway). American readers had begun to take notice of Woolf’s novels.”

J.H. Willis Jr, Leonard and Virginia Woolf as Publishers: The Hogarth Press 1917-1941

More illustrated Hogarth Press first editions

Mont Blanc pen – the Virginia Woolf special edition

Writing

“I feel certain that I am going mad again”

Virginia Woolf – podcast

A eulogy on words

Other works by Virginia Woolf

Orlando (1928) is one of her lesser-known novels, although it’s critical reputation has risen in recent years. It’s a delightful fantasy which features a character who changes sex part-way through the book – and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Using this device (which turns out to be strangely credible) Woolf explores issues of gender and identity as her hero-heroine moves through a variety of lives and personal adventures. Orlando starts out as an emissary to the Court of St James, lives through friendships with Swift and Alexander Pope, and ends up motoring through the west end of London on a shopping expedition in the 1920s. The character is loosely based on Vita Sackville-West, who at one time was Woolf’s lover. The novel itself was described by Nigel Nicolson (Sackville-West’s son) as ‘the longest and most charming love-letter in literature’.
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