Post by Lucky Dan on Feb 12, 2023 14:01:13 GMT
I'm 100 pages deep into The New York Public Library edition of Thomas Hardy's first popular novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, as serialized in the literary periodical Cornhill Magazine beginning in January 1874.
If you don't know The New York Public Library editions, they are handsome volumes printed on acid-free paper with cut pages and filled with extras from the library's collection of art and manuscripts, including in this case the illustrations for the Cornhill serialization by Helen Paterson Allingham, who it turns out might have been Mrs. Hardy "but for a stupid blunder of God Almighty," as the author confided to a friend more than thirty years after each had married other people.
There is also a reproduction of a diary entry written in July of 1926, describing the author as a cheerful old man who remembered visiting the diarist's father, Leslie Stephen, editor of Cornhill, "... said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister but he thought it was me, in my cradle..."
At only a fifth of the way through, I'm finding the story a mostly accessible rendering of rural England at the time, though I have found myself reading several descriptions of places and action more than twice before giving up on attaining an accurate picture, which is more my own failing than Hardy's, I'm sure. Could strangers have ever been so kind to one another, or the working class so respectful of authority? Was a marriage proposal ever so quickly and confidently offered after a first meeting as Gabriel Oak's to Bathsheba Everdene?
The diarist who wrote of her meeting with Hardy in 1926 said of the novel:
Hardy's genius was uncertain in development, uneven in accomplishment, but, when the moment came, magnificent in achievement. The moment came, completely and fully, in Far from the Madding Crowd. -Virginia Woolf
If you don't know The New York Public Library editions, they are handsome volumes printed on acid-free paper with cut pages and filled with extras from the library's collection of art and manuscripts, including in this case the illustrations for the Cornhill serialization by Helen Paterson Allingham, who it turns out might have been Mrs. Hardy "but for a stupid blunder of God Almighty," as the author confided to a friend more than thirty years after each had married other people.
There is also a reproduction of a diary entry written in July of 1926, describing the author as a cheerful old man who remembered visiting the diarist's father, Leslie Stephen, editor of Cornhill, "... said he had seen me, or it might have been my sister but he thought it was me, in my cradle..."
At only a fifth of the way through, I'm finding the story a mostly accessible rendering of rural England at the time, though I have found myself reading several descriptions of places and action more than twice before giving up on attaining an accurate picture, which is more my own failing than Hardy's, I'm sure. Could strangers have ever been so kind to one another, or the working class so respectful of authority? Was a marriage proposal ever so quickly and confidently offered after a first meeting as Gabriel Oak's to Bathsheba Everdene?
The diarist who wrote of her meeting with Hardy in 1926 said of the novel:
Hardy's genius was uncertain in development, uneven in accomplishment, but, when the moment came, magnificent in achievement. The moment came, completely and fully, in Far from the Madding Crowd. -Virginia Woolf