ABSTRACT
In his first collection of short stories, entitled Wessex Tales, Hardy views the reader as not merely an addressee but also a collaborator in storywriting. Hardy added a preface to the 1896 edition of Wessex Tales (first published in 1888) where he apologizes for discrepancies between the story “The Withered Arm” and its factual basis. But eschewing the opportunity to amend the erroneous facts, Hardy instead chooses to leave the story to the reader’s imagination: “Readers are therefore asked to correct the misrelation, which affords an instance of how our imperfect memories insensibly formalize the fresh originality of living fact – from whose shape they slowly depart, as machine-made castings depart by degrees from the sharp handwork of the mould” (vi; emphasis added). Hardy’s intriguing prefatory statement proposes a dynamic contract between the writer and the reader; it looks forward to the act of reading as a “writerly” intervention in the narrative. That this tactic is not mere reiteration of the literary convention of taking the reader into confidence – a communicative code found in many Victorian novels – is further corroborated by Hardy’s narrative strategy of foregrounding the theme of (mis)reading in the stories “The Withered Arm” and “The Three Strangers” included in Wessex Tales.
