Laodicean, A.
A Laodicean. London: Macmillan, 1912
Virginia Woolf’s copies of a volume of the Wessex Novels series of Thomas Hardy’s Works. Each signed on the front endpaper, V. Stephen.
On the train to meet Hardy for the first and only time, on July 23, 1926, Virginia read through The Mayor of Casterbridge. She had already anxiously written to Vita Sackville-West: “I’m dashing off, you’ll be amused to hear, on my chronic visit to Hardy…. I shall only stay one day and drink one cup of tea, and be so damned nervous I shall spill it on the floor, and what shall I say? Nothing, but arid nonsense. Yet I feel this is a great occasion. Here am I approaching the immortal fount, touching the sacred hand…. ” During the visit Hardy recalled her father’s courageous publication of Far from the Madding Crowd; Virginia immortalized his comment in her diary: “We stood shoulder to shoulder against the British public about certain matters dealt with in that novel.” Leslie had promoted Hardy’s early fiction in Cornhill, but in 1877 even he deemed The Return of the Native too provocative for his conservative magazine. Hardy inscribed a copy of Life’s Little Ironies for Virginia to take away as a souvenir of her visit to Max Gate.
One week after Hardy’s death on January 11, 1928, Virginia anonymously published the obituary on which she had been working, off and on, since 1919: “Thomas Hardy’s Novels” appeared in the TLS on January 19, 1928, and was later revised for The Common Reader: Second Series (1932) and later publications. In 1936, while struggling with The Years, she read Hardy’s The Trumpet Major, and expressed a revised opinion: “He had genius & no talent.” In her obituary she takes pains to illustrate the difference between the two, concluding that despite the many “imperfections” in many of his novels, on the whole “The effect is commanding and satisfactory”:
We have been freed from the cramp and pettiness imposed by life. Our imaginations have been stretched and heightened; our humour has been made to laugh out; we have drunk deep of the beauty of the earth. Also we have been made to enter the shade of a sorrowful and brooding spirit which, even in its saddest mood, bore itself with a grave uprightness and never, even when most moved to anger, lost its deep compassion for the sufferings of men and women. Thus it is no mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.
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