Pamela Dalziel – författare

When Elfrise Swanston meets Stephen Smith she is attracted to his handsome face, gentle bearing and the sense of mystery which surrounds him. Although distressed to find that the mystery consists only in the humbleness of his origins, she remains true to their youthful vows. But societal pressures, and the advent of the superior Henry Knight, eventually displace her affections. Knight, however, proves to be an uncompromising moralist who, obsessed with fears about Elfride's sexual past, destroys her happiness.Writing of the struggle between classes and sexes, Hardy drew heavily on his own relationships, and in the introduction, Pamela Dalziel discovers fascinating parallels between Hardy's life and his art.

Thomas Hardy's Studies, Specimens &c. notebook stands almost alone as a witness to his exertions and aspirations of the 1860s, when he was already in his middle twenties but still working in London as an architectual assistant and only tentatively feeling his way towards as yet dimly glimpsed possibilities of literary expression and employment. Because so little documentation of any kind has survived for this early period of his life and work, the notebook is of extraordinary interest as containing detailed evidence of the untutored deliberateness with which Hardy was seeking to provide himself with a poetic background, educate himself in poetic techniques, and initiate a process from which he could perhaps emerge as a practising, even a publishing, poet. In private hands until very recently, and seen by only a very few scholars, Studies, Specimens &c.' dates from 1865-68, is entirely in Hardy's own hand, and consists of eighty-eight closely written pages of working memoranda, and quotations from other poets - mostly extracts a few words long in which underlining has been used to highlight individual images and word-usages. Although no drafts of actual poems are present, there are numerous instances of Hardy's seeking to generate a poetic, and sometimes erotic, language and imagery out of materials (e.g., an architectual textbook) apparently chosen precisley for their recalcitrance to such treatment.The edition itself seeks to reproduce typographically all essential features of the original document. The introductory material describes the notebook bibliographically, sets it in its biographical context, and discusses some of its more important technical features. Included in the extensive apparatus are textual notes, explications of Hardy's occasional quotations - indicating, in most instances, the editions or actual volumes he certainly or probably used. Explanatory notes are provided for - among other things - some erased but now partly recoved memoranda of Hardy's that appear to have significant biographical implications.

Included in this edition are ten stories, varying in length from sketch to novella, which were never collected into volumes during Hardy's lifetime. Some contained references to actual people, or plot elements that he reused elsewhere; others, such as his only stories for children, were simply too different from his other work in the short-story form; the longest, `An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress', was apparently left uncollected to allow for a possible reconstruction of the `lost' novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, from which it was drawn. The three final stories resulted from literary collaborations which were also emotional involvements, with Florence Henniker in `The Spectre of the Real', and with Florence Dugdale, later the second Mrs Hardy, in `Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer' and `The Unconquerable' (now published for the first time).Although all of these stories occupy significant positions within Hardy's career as a writer of fiction - extending that career, indeed, both earlier and later than the standard account would allow - none of them has previously received serious editorial treatment. For the most part they have also been ignored or lightly passed over by critics and biographers, and such discussion as they have aroused has frequently been based on false assumptions. This edition remedies some of these deficiencies in Hardy scholarship, both in its historical introductions and in its critically edited texts, which are based on full collations of all editions published before Hardy's death and all surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and proofs (many of which have gone almost entirely unexamined in the past). Complete lists of the variants in these pre-publication witnesses and in all authorially authorized printings supplement the edited texts.