ABSTRACT
Barbara Hardy’s first book, The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form, for which she was awarded the British Academy’s Rose Mary Crawshay Prize, had a vital impact on my life long before I read it. It was Winston Rhodes, my Professor of English at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, who had read it as soon as it came out from the University of London’s Athlone Press in 1959 and been hugely impressed. He himself was a Marxist who believed in literature for life’s sake, but he was nevertheless also very interested in the structuralist formal criticism of R. S. Crane and the Chicago School, and he immediately recognized that here was a new voice in criticism. So impressed was he by the young Barbara Hardy’s fusion of psychology, ethics and social analysis in her championing of George Eliot’s hitherto disregarded formal mastery, that he suggested I should apply to take up my Commonwealth postgraduate scholarship to do doctoral work (on the comedy of E. M. Forster) with her, rather than at Cambridge. And it was just two weeks after my arrival at Birkbeck in October 1960 that I attended Professor Tillotson’s coffee party for English post-graduates and there met both Barbara Hardy herself and my future husband, Derek Oldfield. Derek was an older postgraduate student of Barbara’s, working on style in Middlemarch. That evening she asked the two of us to give postgraduate seminar papers on The Golden Bowl — papers that would integrate an analysis of the novel’s meaning with different aspects of its fictional form. We turned to each other for a bit of moral support — much as we would find ourselves doing for the next forty-eight years.
