ABSTRACT
While reviews of Hardy’s later novels tended to divide along philosophical lines between conservative disapproval and progressive acclaim, the contemporary critical reception of A Group of Noble Dames, the author’s second collection of shorter fiction, was exceptionally uncertain. As usual, notices in the British provincial press of the special Christmas number of the Graphic for 1890 gave more attention to the pictorial content of the journal, though there was generally brief applause on this occasion for the principal item of letterpress, the initial “six-dame” version of Hardy’s collection. The Yorkshire Herald, for example, welcomed it somewhat anomalously as a “very pleasant tale” (“Annuals” 6). On the other hand, the appearance as a single volume in late May 1891 of the revised version – doubled in length with the addition of four new “dames” previously treated independently in other periodicals – drew marked dissent from several influential metropolitan organs that had hitherto been broadly sympathetic to the writer’s fiction. Predictably, the reactionary Spectator found a “nauseous element” pervading every story (“A Group” 164), while the independent Saturday Review, which had long treated Hardy’s work with respect if not with uniform approval, this time wrote off the collection as a “literary freak” (“New Books” 757).1 Most striking of all, though, was the response of the (London) Pall Mall Gazette, the club-land evening paper that had committed early to investigative reporting, and fashioned itself under W. T. Stead’s editorship as the leading exponent of the “new journalism.” Unsurprisingly, given its notorious exposé in summer 1885 of child prostitution in the metropolis, the Gazette had remained sympathetic to Hardy’s increasing demands to be allowed to deal candidly with the sexuality of his creations. On the appearance of A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873 it had hailed the author as “a man of genius” (“Pair of Blue Eyes” 12), and still recognized Tess of the d’Urbervilles in late 1891 as “the strongest English novel of many years” (“Mr. Thomas Hardy’s New Novel” 3). Six months earlier, though, the Gazette had attacked his latest book of stories as an abuse of the slackening of “external constraint” concerning sexual matters (“Merry Wives” Review
3). Likened to the work of Baudelaire,2 “Barbara of the House of Grebe,” the second story in the expanded collection, was singled out as “a hideous, a hateful fantasy” (3), with particular distaste directed towards the conclusion focusing on the heroine’s “obsequious amativeness towards a perverse and cruel man,” in Hardy’s words (A Group, Osgood, McIlvaine 104). This led to a fascinating exchange, at once comic and disturbing, between author and critic.
