A Group of Noble Dames E-Book

Thomas Hardy.

• Herausgeber: Thomas Hardy
• Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

British novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. He captured the epoch just before the railways and the industrial revolution changed the English countryside. His works are pessimistic and bitterly ironic, and his writing is rough but capable of immense power.His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed the manuscript. Only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist George Meredith. Desperate Remedies [1871] and Under the Greenwood Tree [1872] were published anonymously. In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name.In Far from the Madding Crowd [1874], his next (and first important) novel, Hardy introduced Wessex, the "partly-real, partly-dream" county named after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in the area. The landscape was modelled on the real counties of Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire, with fictional places based on real locations.Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels.The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native [1878]. In 1885, they moved for a last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886], The Woodlanders [1887], and Tess of the d'Urbervilles [1891], the latter which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, was met with even stronger negative outcries by the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex.Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in English literature by the 1900s, with several blockbuster novels under his belt, yet he was disgusted with the public reception of two of his greatest works. He gave up writing novels altogether.

Leseprobe

A Group of Noble Dames

Thomas Hardy

‘ . . . Store of Ladies, whose bright eyes

Rain influence.’

L’Allegro.

Table of Contents

Preface

Part I— Before Dinner

Dame the First — the first Countess of Wessex By the Local Historian

Dame the Second — barbara of the House of Grebe By the Old Surgeon

Dame the Third — the Marchioness of Stonehenge By the Rural Dean

Dame the Fourth — lady Mottisfont By the Sentimental Member

Part II— After Dinner

Dame the Fifth — the Lady Icenway By the Churchwarden

Dame the Sixth — squire Petrick’s Lady By the Crimson Maltster

Dame the Seventh — anna, Lady Baxby By the Colonel

Dame the Eighth — the Lady Penelope By the Man of Family

Dame the Ninth — the Duchess of Hamptonshire By the Quiet Gentleman

Dame the Tenth — the Honourable Laura By the Spark

Preface

The pedigrees of our county families, arranged in diagrams on the pages of county histories, mostly appear at first sight to be as barren of any touch of nature as a table of logarithms. But given a clue — the faintest tradition of what went on behind the scenes, and this dryness as of dust may be transformed into a palpitating drama. More, the careful comparison of dates alone — that of birth with marriage, of marriage with death, of one marriage, birth, or death with a kindred marriage, birth, or death — will often effect the same transformation, and anybody practised in raising images from such genealogies finds himself unconsciously filling into the framework the motives, passions, and personal qualities which would appear to be the single explanation possible of some extraordinary conjunction in times, events, and personages that occasionally marks these reticent family records.

Out of such pedigrees and supplementary material most of the following stories have arisen and taken shape.

I would make this preface an opportunity of expressing my sense of the courtesy and kindness of several bright-eyed Noble Dames yet in the flesh, who, since the first publication of these tales in periodicals, six or seven years ago, have given me interesting comments and conjectures on such of the narratives as they have recognized to be connected with their own families, residences, or traditions; in which they have shown a truly philosophic absence of prejudice in their regard of those incidents whose relation has tended more distinctly to dramatize than to eulogize their ancestors. The outlines they have also given of other singular events in their family histories for use in a second “Group of Noble Dames,” will, I fear, never reach the printing-press through me; but I shall store them up in memory of my informants’ good nature.

T. H.

June 1896.

Dame the First

The first Countess of Wessex

By the Local Historian

King’s-Hintock Court (said the narrator, turning over his memoranda for reference)— King’s-Hintock Court is, as we know, one of the most imposing of the mansions that overlook our beautiful Blackmoor or Blakemore Vale. On the particular occasion of which I have to speak this building stood, as it had often stood before, in the perfect silence of a calm clear night, lighted only by the cold shine of the stars. The season was winter, in days long ago, the last century having run but little more than a third of its length. North, south, and west, not a casement was unfastened, not a curtain undrawn; eastward, one window on the upper floor was open, and a girl of twelve or thirteen was leaning over the sill. That she had not taken up the position for purposes of observation was apparent at a glance, for she kept her eyes covered with her hands.