ABSTRACT
Alfred Sutro To [William] Archer,1 too, I owed an introduction to Thomas Hardy; he asked me to lunch, and I bicycled over from our cottage at Studland. There were only he and I and his wife – the first Mrs Hardy, of course – at the meal; it was about the time when Jude the Obscure had been published, and I was loud in my praise of that work. Mrs Hardy was far from sharing my enthusiasm. It was the first novel of his, she told me, that he had published without first letting her read the manuscript; had she read it, she added firmly, it would not have been published, or at least, not without considerable emendations. The book had made a difference to them, she added, in the County. [...]
The position was awkward for me, and very embarrassing; Hardy said nothing, and did not lift his eyes from the plate; I was hard put to it to manufacture some kind of conversation, and it was a great relief when Mrs Hardy rose, and left us to our port. Even then Hardy’s silence persisted, till I told him of a bird in our wood whose identity puzzled us; we had discovered at last that it was a corncrake. Hardy brightened at once, the cloud lifted, and we talked, talked birds and trees, evidently a favourite subject of his, till I left (pp. 58-9).
