The Widow Hardy

THE LATER YEARS OF THOMAS HARDY -- Florence Emily Hardy -- Macmillan ($5).

Most respectable memoirs are dull: this one is no exception. Abundant with annotation and anecdote, Mrs. Hardy's work is a boon to Hardy scholars, a bore to lay readers. Only relieving element in the volume is the biographer's charitable lack of sentimentality.

Thomas Hardy was essentially a poet. Fiction began with him as an avocation, partly because he was passionately fond of the tales told him of his native Dorset, and thought something should be done about them, partly because his first popular novel (Far from the Madding Crowd) produced such a sensation, both in England and America, that he would have been stupid to quit. That he had not too high an opinion of either his prose or his poetry, he indicated in a letter to U. S. Critic Jeannette Gilder : ". . . my respect for my own writings and reputation is so very slight that I care little about what happens to either, so that the rectification of judgments, etc., and the way in which my books are interpreted, do not much interest me."

Shortly after publication of Jude the Obscure, Hardy received a letter containing a packet of ashes labeled by an irate reader as the remains of Author Hardy's "iniquitous novel." After the appearance of Tess of the d'Urbervilles, he was sent hundreds of letters from women of Tess-like experience or inclinations, asking advice or justification of their caprices. These letters Hardy ignored as rigorously as he refused to see newspaper interviewers.

Hardy's life was quiet, from preference (and personal appearance). "Crushes," receptions and balls called forth no Hardy harangue but found little favor in his eyes. His only ambition was to have his poems published in a good anthology, like Palgrave's Golden Treasury. Asked to succeed the late great George Meredith as president of the Society of Authors, he wrote : "I must . . . perform the disagree able duty of acting upon my own conviction of what is for the Society's good, and tell you that I feel compelled to decline the honour." A few weeks later he accepted.

Mrs. Hardy was near enough to her husband to be able to relate numerous anecdotes such as these, but a solemn man makes sedate copy; her biography is by no means in the chatty, picaresque modern mode.

The Author. Memoirist Florence Emily Hardy married Thomas Hardy in February 1914, 16 months after the death of the first Mrs. Hardy. Younger than her husband, she devoted herself to his care, his work, his friends; assiduously noted his every thought and move; be came his female Boswell. Amply aided by the Hardy journal and scores of letters, this book forms the second part of a biography begun with The Early Life of Thomas Hardy (TIME, Feb. 18, 1929), covers the period from 1892 until his death in 1928.

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