ABSTRACT
Thomas Hardy strongly disliked most ‘interviewers’ and those who published unauthorised personal accounts of their visit to Max Gate; even less did he approve of those interviews which, as Michael Millgate describes them, were ‘concocted out of previously published material by people who had never been near either Max Gate or its master’.2 As Hardy wrote in a letter in 1895, ‘such gossip annoys me greatly even when true’.3 The interviews with which this volume opens (with the exception of Smithard’s) were authorized, to the extent that Hardy co-operated in them, but even then they were not necessarily sure to gain his approval (witness his reaction to the Frederick Dolman article, which made him feel ‘victimised’). The earliest three of these interviews were prompted by the publication of Tess in 1892, and it is in marked contrast that he refused to give any interviews to coincide with the publication of Jude the Obscure four years later. Hardy was, perhaps, becoming even more reticent and he was certainly increasingly wary of journalistic intrusion; the ‘author of Tess’, as Hardy came to be described, was now inevitably a public figure and the object of much literary and personal curiosity, and this eminence was to increase throughout the remainder of his life. It is notable how many of the recollections which are reprinted here describe Hardy in the 1920s, reflecting the fact that, following the deaths of Swinburne and Meredith in 1909, Hardy spent the last two decades of his life as the Grand Old Man of letters.
