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Reading Failure in(to) Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Sue Bridehead and Lady Jeune's “New Woman” Essays, 1885–1900

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

William A. Davis Jr
William A. Davis Jr
Affiliation:
College of Notre Dame of Maryland
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Extract

Thomas hardy was at work on his last novel, Jude the Obscure, when two of the best-known New Woman novels of the 1890s, Sarah Grand's The Heavenly Twins and George Gissing's The Odd Women, appeared in 1893. Hardy read The Heavenly Twins, or at least parts of it, in May 1893 and noted its criticism of the “constant cultivation of the [female] animal instincts” (i.e., the marital and maternal instincts) in his notebook (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:57). Hardy met Sarah Grand later in the spring and praised her to his friend Florence Henniker as a writer who had “decided to offend her friends (so she told me) — & now that they are all alienated she can write boldly, & get listened to” (Collected Letters 2:33). Hardy was also at this time looking into the popular short-story collection Keynotes (1893) by George Egerton (Mary Chavelita Clairmonte), from which he copied a passage concerning man's inability to appreciate “the problems of [woman's] complex nature” (qtd. in Literary Notebooks 2:60). Hardy's interest in George Egerton continued for several years. He wrote to Florence Henniker in January 1894 and reported that he had “found out no more about Mrs. Clairmont [sic]”; Sue Bridehead at this same time was still “very nebulous” (Collected Letters 2:47). Two years later, Hardy had found the author of Keynotes and finished his novel: he wrote to Mrs. Clairmonte in late December 1895, two months after the publication of Jude the Obscure, and commented on their shared interest in the Sue characters “type”: “I have been intending for years to draw Sue, & it is extraordinary that a type of woman, comparatively common & getting commoner, should have escaped fiction so long” (Collected Letters 2:102). Hardy's comment suggests that Sue's origins were, at least in part, real New Women, and that he had been following the New Woman phenomenon for several years. Hardy had completed work on Jude in the spring of 1895 while simultaneously reading another New Woman novel, the best-selling and controversial The Woman Who Did (1895) by Grant Allen. Hardy wrote to Allen in February 1895 to thank Allen for sending a copy of the novel and to express his praise for the book, which he had read “from cover to cover.” Hardy added that it “was curious to find how exactly [Allen] had anticipated my view” (Collected Letters 2:68).

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Spring 1998 , pp. 53 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1998

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