Abstract
Like Wessex Tales, A Group of Noble Dames is a collection of stories from the Wessex past. But, as Hardy told Harper’s in 1890, the later volume is ‘of a somewhat different kind’ from his previous work, ‘excepting The First Countess of Wessex, which comes near it in character’.1 Since the exception Hardy cited is the volume’s most documented story, it is likely that what he thought distinctive in A Group of Noble Dames is its whimsical use of history, different in method and tone from his other fiction about the past. Most of these stories are set in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — a period that Hardy could not in the majority of cases have learned of from people who were alive at the time — and their reconstruction of events is fantastical rather than retrospective, imaginary rather than imaginative. Although Hardy claimed that the women in the volume were ‘mostly drawn from life’2 and wrote to Lord Lytton that he got the stories ‘from the lips of aged people in a remote part of the country’,3 his chief known source is Hutchins’s History of Dorset. Indeed, the collection seems to have fewer direct links with oral tradition than Hardy’s other stories set in the past.
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Notes
‘ “Hodge” As I Know Him: A Talk with Mr. Thomas Hardy’, Pall Mall Gazette, 2 Jan. 1892, repr. Thomas Hardy and His Readers, ed. Laurence Lerner and John Holstrom (London: Bodley Head, 1968) p. 158. See also Kay-Robinson, p. 255, and Hardy to Edward Clodd, 3 June 1891, in CL, I, 237.
Raymond Blathwayt, ‘A Chat with the Author of “Tess”’, Black and White, 4 (1892) 240.
J. I. M. Stewart, Thomas Hardy (London: Longman, 1971) p. 37.
Ilchester, The Home of the Hollands, 1605–1820 (London: John Murray, 1937) p. 35.
John Hutchins, The History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, II (Westminster: J. B. Nichols, 1861; repr. East Ardsley: E P Publishing, 1973) 665. Betty Dornell’s epitaph for her husband, ‘in which she described him as the best of husbands, fathers, and friends, and called herself his disconsolate widow’ (48), constitutes an accurate paraphrasing of the inscription on Stephen Fox’s monument (see Hutchins, II, p. 679).
Hardy to Pall Mall Gazette, 10 July 1891, quoted in Michael Millgate’s Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (New York: Random House, 1971) p. 289.
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© 1982 Kristin Brady
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Brady, K. (1982). A Group of Noble Dames: Ambivalent Exempla. In: The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07402-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07402-0_2
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