ABSTRACT
Mrs Belloc Lowndes Long before [Hardy’s] death I wrote the following account of him for a friend who was living abroad:
‘Of the novelists I have come to know, I consider Thomas Hardy the most agreeable and unassuming, I mean as a human being. He differs from almost everybody who is anybody, by being apparently quite indifferent as to the effect he is producing on the people round him. He occasionally alludes to his books, but in a natural and unaffected manner, never assuming the person to whom he is talking has read any of them’.
