ABSTRACT
Woolf had visited Thomas and Florence Hardy just a year and a month before she wrote these comments in her diary and she had recorded then, with relish, the chocolate cake and the tousled dog and Hardy’s clear-sighted conversation. One passage she recorded is of particular interest for the present discussion:
Did you write poems at the same time as your novels? I asked. No, he said. I wrote a great many poems. I used to send them about, but they were always returned, he chuckled. And in those days I believed in editors. Many were lost – all the fair copies were lost. But I found the notes, & wrote them from those. I was always finding them. I found one the other day; but I don’t think I shall find them anymore.2
