ABSTRACT
A Group of Noble Dames was first published by Osgood, Mcilvaine on 30 May 1891 at 6s. in an edition of 2000 copies, and it marked the beginning of Hardy's association with the firm. All of the ten stories in the volume had previously appeared in serial form. The nucleus of A Group of Noble Dames is the six stories which had appeared in the 1890 Christmas Number of the Graphic, namely 'Barbara of the House of Grebe', 'The Marchioness of Stonehenge', 'Lady Mottisfont', 'The Lady Icenway', 'Squire Petrick's Lady' and 'Anna, Lady Baxby'. All six stories in their serial form were bowdlerized and altered in plot and detail, three of them especially so ('Mottisfont', 'Petrick' and 'Baxby'). The serialization of these six stories will be discussed separately below. When Hardy came to arrange the publication of A Group of Noble Dames in book form in early 1891, he added four more stories. Two of them, 'The First Countess of Wessex' and 'The Lady Penelope', were relatively recent, having been written in 1888-89, but the other two date from many years earlier and are among the first short stories which Hardy ever wrote: 'The Duchess of Hamptonshire' (under its original title of 'The Impulsive Lady of Croome Castle') was composed in early 1878, while 'The Honourable Laura' (as 'Benighted Travellers') was written in autumn 1881. The collection of stories in A Group of Noble Dames therefore represents some of Hardy's work in the short story form over a period of thirteen years from 1878 to 1891. In arranging the stories for this collected edition, Hardy slightly altered the sequence in which the six Graphic stories had appeared, for reasons which will be discussed in the individual chapters below. His aim in the volume as a whole was to place the stories in a contrapuntal structure, so that 'with few exceptions, each story can be seen as a repatterning or ironic refutation of the ostensible moral of the one preceding it' (Brady, p. 53).
