ABSTRACT
Writing in her diary on Monday, 2 August 1926, Virginia Woolf heads a section ‘The Married Relation’ – she writes:
Arnold Bennett says that the horror of marriage lies in its ‘dailiness’. All acuteness of relationship is rubbed away by this. The truth is more like this. Life – say 4 days out of 7 – becomes automatic; but on the 5th day a bead of sensation (between husband & wife) forms, wh. is all the fuller & more sensitive because of the automatic customary unconscious days on either side. That is to say the year is marked by moments of great intensity. Hardy’s ‘moments of vision’. How can a relationship endure for any length of time except under these conditions? 1
Woolf here evokes Hardy’s sensitivity both to the oblivious nature of daily life and to its sudden awakenings. She turns to him as the truth-teller about ‘the married relation’ and away from the cynicism of Bennett with his emphasis on depletion of sensation. The rhythms of marriage alternate between the slackened and the intense: ‘moments of intensity’ even rely on the humdrum intervals, Woolf suggests. Strikingly, she is describing ordinary daily process as it takes place, not the seized condensation and recoil of recollection, so frequent in Hardy’s poetry. Hardy’s collection Moments of Vision, and Miscellaneous Verses had been published in 1917, though it included poems written over a long period.