 Thomas Hardy Licensed by Creative Commons"Well, I was mortually wounded by Tess of the Durberfields. I do not know that I am exaggerative in criticism; but I will say Tess is one of the worst, the weakest, least sane, most volulu books I have yet read [. . .] I could never finish it, there may be the treasures of the Indies further on; but so far as I read, James, it was (in one word) damnable. Not alive, not true, was my continual comment as I read, and at last - not even honest! was the verdict with which I spewed it from my mouth. I write in anger? I almost think I do; I was betrayed in a friend's house - and I was pained to hear that other friends delighted in the barmecide feast. I cannot read a page of Hardy for many a long day, my confidence is gone. So that you and Barrie and Kipling are now my Muses Three. And with Kipling, as you know, there are reservations to be made. And you and Barrie don't write enough"
(Letter from RLS to Henry James, 4 December 1892, The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol vii [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 450)
"Did I tell you that we saw Hardy the novelist at Dorchester? A pale, gentle, frightened little man, that one felt an instinctive tenderness for, with a wife - ugly is no word for it, who said 'whatever shall we do?' I had never heard a living being say it before"
(Letter from Fanny Stevenson to Margaret Stevenson, 10 September 1885, The Collected Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol v [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 125)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet. Most of his fiction is set in what he called Wessex (the area he described was south and southwest England – Wessex was the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom name that Hardy borrowed). He is most famous for novels like Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887 - RLS wanted to take this novel with him when he left for the USA in 1887. He sent his friend Edmund Gosse to find it for him), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895).
Hardy also wrote short stories, plays, and many volumes of poetry, including Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898). His writing is often extraordinarily bleak, with recurring themes of loss, the struggle against circumstances and fate, and suffering.
Although he trained to be an architect, Hardy decided to pursue a writing career. He left London (where he had been living) and returned to Dorset, where he was born and spent his childhood. He married Emma Lavinia Gifford in 1874. Hardy was deeply distressed by her death in 1912 and wrote many poems about their complicated relationship. He married Florence Emily Dudgate in 1914.
RLS first met Thomas Hardy in Dorchester at the end of August or early September 1885. RLS, Fanny, Lloyd and Katherine de Mattos visited Hardy in his new home, Max Gate, Dorchester. For more information about this visit, see the section devoted to Dorchester in the Footsteps section of the RLS website.
In early June 1886, RLS wrote to Thomas Hardy about the possibility of dramatizing his The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886). Hardy replied on 7 June: “I feel several inches taller at the idea of your thinking of dramatizing the Mayor, Yes, by all means” (from The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Bradford A. Booth and Ernest Mehew, vol v [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995], p. 259). Despite Hardy’s seeming enthusiasm, nothing more came of RLS’s proposal.
From around 9-12 June 1886, RLS was staying with Sidney Colvin in his apartment in the British Museum, London. On the 9th, he wrote to Thomas Hardy, asking him to dinner at Colvin’s. Hardy accepted, and they had dinner on 11 June.
Although Stevenson usually admired Hardy’s work, he strongly disliked Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), writing damning letters about the work to W.E. Henley, J.M. Barrie and Henry James (see, for example, the quotation beginning this section). William Gray argues that “the vehemence of Stevenson’s criticism of Tess may be in some measure due to its succes de scandale in an area in which he himself had had problems: the representation of sexuality in the context of Victorian publishing” (Robert Louis Stevenson: A Literary Life [Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], p. 18).
In I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson (1922), Hardy contributed his own memories of the writer. He recounted the visit in Dorchester, the dinner with Colvin and the proposal for the play concluding with the words:
“I heard no more about the play; and I think I may say that to my vision he dropped into utter darkness from that date: I recall no further sight of or communication from him, though I used to hear of him in a roundabout way from friends of his and mine. I should add that some years later I read an interview with him that had been published in the newspapers, in which he stated that he disapproved of the morals of Tess of the d’Urberbvilles, which had appeared in the interim, and probably had led to his silence” (Thomas Hardy, I Can Remember Robert Louis Stevenson, ed. by Rosaline Masson [Edinburgh: W&R Chambers, 1922], pp. 215-16).
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