Introduction

In Hardy’s day the literary Companion did not exist. ¹ However, an early embryonic version, a critical series published by the Athenaeum, initiated in the 1870s a ‘Novels of the Week’ forum of considerable influence at a time when the novel itself was coming of age, eligible for status and recognition in its own right as an art form. ² As an historico-cultural document the Athenaeum series offers modern readers invaluable insights into Hardy’s novels in their genesis as his career as a novelist unfolds. By contrast, the modern-day Companion speaks to the canonical Hardy and, in significant respects, to an institutionalized ‘Grand Old Man of English Letters’ – although, inasmuch as the cinematic articulation of Hardy-on-screen has, in the millennium years, increasingly gained recognition as an art form, the modern critic does in fact face ontogenic modes of Hardyan narratives in a genre not altogether unknown to the bard himself. ³ Just as the novel, as a relatively new and experimental genre, was often regarded by early Victorians as a maverick art, so too the reaction to movie narratives, or in this case ‘Hardy movies’. These received insufficient critical attention until very recently with Paul Niemeyer's Seeing Hardy: Film and Television Adaptations of the Fiction of Thomas Hardy ⁴ and Thomas Hardy on Screen, edited by T. R. Wright. ⁵