ABSTRACT

Edith Wharton I met [Hardy] several times, and though he was as remote and uncommunicative as our most unsocial American men of letters, his silence seemed due to an unconquerable shyness rather than to the great man’s disdain for humbler neighbours. I sometimes sat next to him at luncheon at Lady St Helier’s, and I found it comparatively easy to carry on a mild chat on literary matters. I remember once asking him if it were really true that the editor of the American magazine which had the privilege of publishing Jude the Obscure had insisted on his transforming the illegitimate children of Jude and Sue into adopted orphans.1 He smiled, and said yes, it was a fact; but he added philosophically that he was not much surprised, as the editor of the Scottish magazine which had published his first short story had objected to his making his hero and heroine go for a walk on a Sunday, and obliged him to transfer the stroll to a weekday!2 He seemed to take little interest in the literary movements of the day, or in fact in any critical discussion of his craft, and I felt that he was completely enclosed in his own creative dream, through which I imagine few voices or influences ever reached him (pp. 215-16).