ABSTRACT
The reception of Hardy’s major novels and his poems, although affected by changing literary fashions over the twentieth century, has not suffered especially from the Modernist reaction to things Victorian. His short stories, however, have suffered. Perhaps because the genre has been and still is regarded as reaching its peak in the Modernist writings of the first half of the twentieth century, Hardy’s short stories seem in critical studies to be judged by how closely they approach Modernist form and sensibility, and according to this measure they are often found wanting.1 The Modernist short story is regarded as a very different entity from its nineteenth-century counterpart – so popular in the family magazines of that period, and supposedly written to keep the ‘pot boiling’ by those same authors who were busily employed writing the three-decker novels of the day. Indeed a contemporary reviewer, noting this phenomenon, opens a review in 1891 of A Group of Noble Dames rather ominously: ‘Novelists, whether they have the peculiar gift or not, seem to consider it a point of honour now to bring out at least
one volume of short stories, and Mr Thomas Hardy has followed the multitude – in this case, to do evil.’2 In fact, much of Hardy’s shorter fiction is Janus-faced, looking back to the strong narrative plotting, repetition and coincidence associated with Victorian fiction, and forward to the sparser plot and more reticent characterization and description of the Modernist story. The transitional nature of his shorter fiction makes it vulnerable to twentieth-and twenty-first-century critics who deem a Hardy tale successful depending on how closely it approaches the Modernist paradigm. Interestingly, some contemporary critics recognized Modernist qualities in the stories: reviewing Life’s Little Ironies in 1894, George St. George writes that the stories in this collection seem ‘more modern, more fin de siècle’.3 Also in 1894, the Boston fortnightly The Literary World writes of Ironies and of Hardy’s fiction generally that he
delves into the human mind and drags forth desires and impulses that when once brought to the light justify themselves as neither too far-fetched nor improbable, however unusual they may seem to one at first … Yet Mr. Hardy gives us little explanation or analysis. He tells his story; we may do our own moralizing.4
