This study of Thomas Hardy provides a substantial introduction to his six major novels and his poems. It deals more briefly with the minor fiction. Hardy now seems a more important novelist and poet than at any previous time. This is only partly due to his capabilities as a social historian or provincial chronicler. Far more important is his faithful exploration of the daily trials and tragedies of men and women as feeling beings. Man and woman in love, man and woman 'up against it', are the central themes of his fiction and poetry. His ability to universalise his tragic material, in which he is akin to Shakespeare, is seen as his abiding achievement. Detailed analyses are made of some crucial passages in the major novels and a serious attempt is made to counter the proposition that Hardy 'wrote badly'.
Have we been fooling ourselves? Has the almost complete takeover of culture by the thinking of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment come without a cost? The sequel to the Enlightenment, known as modern life, has expanded our horizons enormously but it has also reduced and restricted us. We have lost identity and relationship and our minds have become fragmented and are often little short of foolish. In particular we haven’t found a way of prioritising, as we must, the only things we surely have: consciousness and (hence) experience. These things are what the word ‘life’ means.We need some form of detachment from the empty counting and measuring that are at the heart of the Enlightenment project. We need to focus less on having, and less even on doing, when our task is being. A more Buddhist detachment may restore our own experience to us and get us beyond the impasses of politics and mechanical science. We need less focus on the outside and more on the inside, for that is where our lives are actually lived.
