Five Very Good Podcasts Now on BBC Sounds

Longtime readers around here will know that I am still a devotee of the iPod Classic, using it to listen to my music, podcasts, and audiobooks. Unfortunately, my iPod Classic has been having battery problems, meaning I can only use plugged in to power. So, it works in the car, but is essentially useless for listening to while doing house chores or working out.

This means I have been forced to listen to stuff like someone from the 2020s (or 2010s); that is to say, on my phone. The first thing I listened to this way was the podcast Doctor Who Redacted, because it can only be accessed through the BBC Sounds app. But once I listened to this podcast (highly recommended, by the way), I realized there was a whole wealth of material that I've been listening to on there, now for around a year I think. As an American, you can listen to whatever you want!*

There doesn't seem, alas, to be a way to view a list of everything you've listened to on the BBC Sounds app, so I am going to give you some recommendations from memory. Probably there is other good stuff I am forgetting.

• "Beethoven Can Hear You" (2020). Actual Deaf actress Sophie Stone plays a Deaf time traveller who travels back in time to meet Beethoven... and discovers that he is not in fact Deaf. Beautifully performed by Stone and Doctor Who's own Peter Capaldi, beautifully written by Timothy X Atack (who I know from the Doctor Who audio dramas), and beautifully sounding, with some interesting things to say about disability and identity.
• Two on a Tower (2021). There are a lot of Thomas Hardy (and other Victorian fiction) adaptations on BBC Sounds, but this has been my favorite of them so far, a genuinely moving adaptation of my favorite minor Hardy, a book that has otherwise gone unadapted. Captures the leads' uncertainty and passion in equal measure.
• Mrs Sidhu Investigates: Murder with Masala (2017). This is a fun mystery comedy, about a nosy Indian caterer who keeps sticking her nose into murders. Meera Syal is hugely funny as the lead, as is Justin Edwards, who plays her long-suffering police contact. My main complaint is that there was only one four-episode series, though it was later turned into both a tv show and a novel.
• Decameron Nights (2014). Ten installments of Boccaccio's Decameron are dramatized in 165 minutes. Lots of good actors in this, and lots of good jokes, really brings the sexual farce elements of the original to life with a lightly modern touch. Lots of familiar voices (Samuel Barnett is good value of course) but you haven't lived until you've heard Big Finish's Jane Slavin as a horny abbess.

• A Vindication of Frankenstein's Monster (2024). I'm not quite done with this, but I am loving it enough to confidently state it will be on my Hugo ballot next year. This story mashes up Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with her mother Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. What if the woman we now mostly remember as the mother of the mother of Frankenstein... kind of became Frankenstein's monster herself? Or, perhaps, she already was? Great science fictional exploration of monstrousness and gender.

* Except for, apparently, Numberblocks Tales, which is a great tragedy for us in the Mollmanns.

The Scientist in Victorian Literature: Doctor Edred Fitzpiers, Surgeon (The Woodlanders, 1886-87)

Trade paperback, 360 pages
Published 2009 (originally 1886-87)
Acquired January 2010
Previously read February 2010
Reread May 2019

The Woodlanders by Thomas Hardy

"There is a surgeon lately come—and I have heard that he reads a great deal—I see his light sometimes through the trees late at night."
     "Oh yes—a doctor—I believe I was told of him...... It is a strange place for him to settle in."
     "It is a convenient centre for a practice, they say. But he does not confine his studies to medicine, it seems. He investigates theology, and metaphysics, and all sorts of subjects." (56)

This is where it all started for me, you know. Way back in 2010, as a second-year graduate student, I read this novel for the first time in a seminar on Darwin, Hardy, and Woolf. I was intrigued by its depiction of a scientist, and how that scientist's behavior outside of science seemed to be affected by his scientific training. I went seeking a source that could tell me more about this-- and I never found one. So now I am writing one, revising my dissertation project into an academic monograph. One of the sample chapters I want to send in with my proposal is the one that includes The Woodlanders, and I haven't read the book since I took that class almost ten years ago, and now I need to revise it. I am sure that that part of the book needs work, since I have (hopefully) advanced as a writer and scholar in the past ten years.

What I had not remembered is how much Fitzpiers is an off-stage presence at the beginning of the novel. It initially seems like it might be about Marty South, daughter of a rural woodsman, but soon focuses on Grace Melbury, daughter of a timber-merchant, and whether she should marry Giles Winterbourne, another local woodsman, now that's she's been elevated by a middle-class education out of town. Fitzpiers is spoken of from p. 8 onwards, glimpsed on p. 60, but does not properly appear until p. 92, almost a third of the way through the novel. We hear a lot about him before he appears so, as in the above quotation. We're told he reads Spinoza (45), and that he has widespread interests (56), and that he has paid the Melburys' servant, Grammer Oliver, ten pounds so that he can have her brain after she dies-- he is intrigued because her head is the size of a man's (46). The locals both do and do not trust this highly educated doctor, whose like they don't normally see in a place like Little Hintock. Some think he studies black arts and sold his soul to the devil... but they kind of like that, because the worse the person, the better the doctor! (28) The other local doctor is so nice, he won't even give you foul-tasting medicine, so obviously it's not actually doing anything.

But it turns out that a bad man is a bad doctor. Like other too-educated surgeons in rural communities (e.g., Thurnall in Two Years Ago, Lydgate in Middlemarch), he struggles to build much of a practice; he's certainly no Mr. Gibson from Wives and Daughters. When he suggests treating Marty's father, who is being driven mad by a tree, by chopping down the tree, Marty's dad dies. Worse than the outcome of the experiment is his highly casual reaction to the loss of a man's life, as he seizes the opportunity to ask Giles about a hot chick he saw the other day:

Nothing seemed to avail. Giles and Fitzpiers went and came; but uselessly. He [Mr. South] lingered through the day, and died that evening as the sun went down.
     "Damned if my remedy hasn't killed him!" murmured the doctor.
     Dismissing the subject he went downstairs. When going out of the house he turned suddenly to Giles and said, "Who was that young lady we looked at over the hedge the other day?"
     Giles shook his head, as if he did not remember. (94)

Later, Fitzpiers gets some of Mr. South's brain, and it's while looking at a sample of it that Grace first starts to fall for him!

Fitzpiers's case is more complicated than many of the ones I look at, though, and I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Fitzpiers is a would-be scientist, but as I've said, his interests are diverse: he also studies philosophy, and French romances, and so on. This dilettantism is what's consistent across both his personal and intellectual lives. He wants to do experiments, but cannot follow them through to completion. He falls in love with Grace, but is interested in not only her. Does this mean Hardy thinks he would be a better person if he stuck to science? Then it would seem that science is not the culprit, not entirely, but I don't find this entirely satisfying. Which I guess is appropriate, because the end-- where Fitzpiers resolves to stick to Grace this time-- is not entirely satisfying either.

Is Thomas Hardy Responsible for the Word "Cliffhanger"?

The prototypical Victorian cliff
William Dyce's Pegwell Bay, Kent – a Recollection of October 5th 1858

Previously I blogged about Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes. Like many Victorian novels, A Pair of Blue Eyes was serialized; it appeared in installments in numbers of Tinsley's Magazine across 1872 and 1873. One installment ends with Henry Knight, one of the principal characters, stumbling down a cliff. I apologize for a lengthy quotation; Knight has just saved a girl, Elfride from tumbling down too, but is losing his grip:

Between the turf-covered slope and the gigantic perpendicular rock intervened a weather-worn series of jagged edges, forming a face yet steeper than the former slope. As he slowly slid inch by inch upon these, Knight made a last desperate dash at the lowest tuft of vegetation – the last outlying knot of starved herbage ere the rock appeared in all its bareness. It arrested his further descent. Knight was now literally suspended by his arms; but the incline of the brow being what engineers would call about a quarter in one, it was sufficient to relieve his arms of a portion of his weight, but was very far from offering an adequately flat face to support him.
     In spite of this dreadful tension of body and mind, Knight found time for a moment of thankfulness. Elfride was safe.
     She lay on her side above him – her fingers clasped. Seeing him again steady, she jumped upon her feet.
     ‘Now, if I can only save you by running for help!’ she cried. ‘Oh, I would have died instead! Why did you try so hard to deliver me?’ And she turned away wildly to run for assistance.
     ‘Elfride, how long will it take you to run to Endelstow and back?’
     ‘Three-quarters of an hour.’
     ‘That won’t do; my hands will not hold out ten minutes. And is there nobody nearer?’
     ‘No; unless a chance passer may happen to be.’
     ‘He would have nothing with him that could save me. Is there a pole or stick of any kind on the common?’
     She gazed around. The common was bare of everything but heather and grass.
     A minute – perhaps more time – was passed in mute thought by both. On a sudden the blank and helpless agony left her face. She vanished over the bank from his sight.
     Knight felt himself in the presence of a personalized loneliness.

And boom! You'll have to wait a month to read how that one resolves.

If you read a lot of Victorian novels, you'll know they're rarely so, well, cliffhangery in their serialization. Usually, they just kind of stop where one would stop any chapter while writing a novel. Wilkie Collins is probably the only Victorian novelist who bothers to have cliffhangers-- some of the ones in The Woman in White will knock you over.

As you can see above, this cliffhanger is surprisingly literal, the most literal cliffhanger I can think of other than the bit in the Doctor Who serial Dragonfire where the Doctor climbs down a cliff for no readily apparent reason, gets stuck, and then the theme music comes in. A lot of articles out there assert that it is thanks to Thomas Hardy and A Pair of Blue Eyes that we thus have the word "cliffhanger":

• "The literary term, 'cliffhanger', derives most likely from Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes." (The Victorian Web)
• "Yet the iconic cliffhanger derives not from Dickens but from 'A Pair of Blue Eyes,' a little-known novel by Thomas Hardy..." (The New Yorker)
• "The term that we use to describe Scheherazade’s trick was in fact coined in response to a novel by Thomas Hardy." (BBC*)
• "Cliffhangers themselves (the term arose from Thomas Hardy and his preference for unsubtle plot twists) are time-honored narrative devices..." (The Atlantic) 

These are hopefully all sources that do their research, but I am skeptical of the claim, because the word "cliffhanger" doesn't come into existence until around 1931, according to the OED, which cites an article about movie serials from Variety: "Probabilities are a serial based on the life of Buffalo Bill and a treasure island thriller. Henry McRae, in charge of the cliff hangers, is searching for story material." It cross-references "cliff-hanging," which was used slightly earlier in 1930, still in Variety: "Fitting..into the pattern is the revival of the serial, with Universal and Pathe leading the procession toward cliff-hanging heroines."

Google Ngram Search backs the OED up on this, with no hits for "cliffhanger," "cliff-hanger," or "cliff hanger" in the whole nineteenth century. Google Books's earliest hit is hard to figure out because it has a number of misdated items and books you can only see snippets of, but around 1937. And then it doesn't refer to the suspenseful ending the way we use it now, but to the whole adventure serial itself.

Access this chart yourself here.

It seems unlikely to me that movie industry insiders of the 1930s were thinking of Thomas Hardy's third Wessex novel and not the more melodramatic perils of their own stories. As far as I can tell from Google Books, the first person to link the origins of the term "cliffhanger" to Thomas Hardy was the literary critic and novelist David Lodge, who says this in his 1992 collection The Art of Fiction:

[A Pair of Blue Eyes] contains a classic scene of suspense.... The word ["suspense"] itself derives from the Latin word meaning "to hang", and there could hardly be a situation more productive of suspense than that of a man clinging by his finger-tips to the face of a cliff, unable to climb to safety – hence the generic term "cliffhanger". (14)

You'll note that if you read Lodge very literally, he doesn't actually say Hardy's novel led to the creation of the term-- he just says A Pair of Blue Eyes has a guy hanging off a cliff, and that the most suspenseful thing there is is hanging off a cliff, which gives us "cliffhanger." But it would be easy to read his discussion here and think A Pair of Blue Eyes gave us the word "cliffhanger." I can't decide if this is deliberately or negligently misleading.

Presumably it carried forward from there, making its way onto the Internet. The Victorian Web article cited above is dated to 26 April 2006; on 3 May 2007, the Wikipedia article "cliffhanger" was updated to include the fact that A Pair of Blue Eyes was the originator. That same edit added a lot of information about Wilkie Collins which has since been stripped away, but the Hardy anecdote remains in the article to this day. Far be it for me to suggest that journalists are lazy, but all my other citations above post-date that Wikipedia edit. I'm not the only person to be suspicious; Google Books revealed to me a book called Totally Scripted: Idioms, Words, and Quotes from Hollywood to Broadway that Have Changed the English Language (2017), whose author, Josh Chetwynd, says "it's unlikely his [Hardy's] original plot directly spawned the term" (44).

While it's pretty neat that Thomas Hardy's cliffhanger was in fact a literal "cliff hanger," and it makes for a nice anecdote, people are overstating the case when they credit Thomas Hardy or reaction to him as the source of the word. I blame David Lodge.

(Though the Hardy cliffhanger claim mostly seems to be restricted to popular venues, I did find it in a book published by Oxford University Press. Hopefully it doesn't keep reproducing throughout academia in error.)

* This article seems to think Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop was written in the 1900s, so we should be very doubtful about any of its assertions.

Review: A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy

I have a review up at Unreality SF, of the first of last year's trilogy of two-in-one Doctor Who stories, Alien Heart and Dalek Soul.

Trade paperback, 432 pages
Published 2005 (originally 1872-73)

Acquired October 2012
Read December 2012

A Pair of Blue Eyes by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy wrote three "scientist novels"; this was the first, preceding Two on a Tower and The Woodlanders. It's also the only one of the three not to play a significant part in my book about Victorian scientists in fiction, because I think Hardy has less to say about Henry Knight as a scientist than he does Two on a Tower's Swithin or The Woodlanders's Fitzpiers.

Partially, this is because Henry Knight is not actually a scientist. The book was published in 1872-73, before the term "scientist" really took off (it wasn't used in fiction, for example, until Hardy himself described Swithin as a scientist in 1882), but even if the term had been in common use, you wouldn't call Knight one. Knight is the enthusiast of science from the age before professionalism, not even a "man of science" but an intellectual man of the upper classes who has many enthusiasisms, including science; for example, he keeps an aquarium (129), and once the narrator calls him a geologist. (More on that later.) But by occupation he is a barrister (not that he actually does any law), and he is also a writer of essays and reviews.

So there might not be an actual scientist in this "scientist novel," but the novel demonstrates-- as both Hardy in particular and the Victorians in general so often do in writing about scientists-- an interest in perceptions and how they are formed. Right from the start, the narrator refuses to describe the novel's heroine, Elfride Swancourt: "It might vulgarise her, and rob her of some of the sweetness which the stolen glimpses only that will for the present be taken may serve to heighten" (7-8). So right from the first page we see the observing someone intensely, with detail and thoroughness, will rob the observer of insight and truth into that person.

Henry Knight is valorized by his friend Stephen Smith for his insight, but we the readers occasionally see that Knight's perceptions are not all that. Thankfully, Knight himself seems to be aware of this, which is more than you can expect of many unaware people; Knight tells Stephen, "All I know about women, or men either, is a mass of generalities. I plod along, and occasionally lift my eyes and skim the weltering surface of mankind lying between me and the horizon, as a crow might; no more" (131). Knight compares himself to a crow, but I wonder if a scientist (man of science) might not be the better comparison. Darwin published The Descent of Man just a year before A Pair of Blue Eyes came out,* and what did Darwin-- or any scientist-- do other than come up with generalities to apply over a wide variety of particular cases based on the occasional skimming? Darwin could not possibly observe all life, and neither can Knight, and so must induct generalities based on what he has seen.

That said, Knight is not aware of his own lack of awareness to the extent he claims to be. (A common problem of the unaware, I might argue.) When Knight misjudges Elfride, the narrator chides, "the essayist's experience of the nature of young women was far less extensive than his abstract knowledge of them led himself and others to believe. He could pack them into sentences like a workman, but empirically was nowhere" (173). We even see an extract from Knight's diary later on, where he attempts to generalize from a single anecdote about Elfride to a general conception of women (176), though it's unclear to me to what extent we're meant to buy Knight's understanding of Elfride as correct. But he is definitely a would-be scientist, categorizing and generalizing what he observes into systems.

Elfride's mother posits, though, that people without such systems actually are better observers; she claims that a

'companionless state will give us, as it does everybody, an extraordinary power in reading the faces of our fellow creatures [...]. I always am a listener [...] – not to the narratives told by my neighbours' tongues, but by their faces – the advantage of which is, that whether I am in Row, Boulevard, Rialto, or Prado, they all speak the same language. I may have acquired some skill in this practice through having been an ugly lonely woman for so many years, with nobody to give me information; a thing you will not consider strange when the parallel is borne in mind, – how truly people who have no clocks will tell the time of day.' (138)

Elfride's father chimes in at this point, suggesting that labouring men learn, because they lack fancy tools, to tell the time or weather much better than those that do have them. So Henry Knight's system of skimming and inducting may allow him to devise useful generalities, but the uneducated man (or woman) observes more deeply and more closely because he has no other option. Mrs. Swancourt almost comes across as a proto-Sherlock Holmes in her ability to extrapolate from the observed's minute particulars. Deduction, not induction. (I think; I always get them confused.)

Of course, I could spend all day teasing out the relationship between sight and knowledge in A Pair of Blue Eyes (how perfect is the observation that "Stephen fell in love with Elfride by looking at her: Knight by ceasing to do so" (188)), but I want to turn to the novel's most famous scene, the one that created the word "cliff-hanger" when A Pair of Blue Eyes was originally serialized in Tinsley's Magazine. Knight is literally hanging from a seaside cliff by his hands, which Hardy describes in evolutionary terms; Knight is said to hold on "with a dogged determination to make the most of his every jot of endurance" (212), and as he observes the cliffside, we're told it is antagonistic to all "strugglers for life" (213), as there is not even a blade of grass or insect upon it, "strugglers for life" recalling the term "struggle for existence" popularized by Malthus and reluctantly adopted by Darwin in On the Origin of Species.

Knight's mind goes blank, and he cannot think of his future or his past. Yet he accesses the past anyway-- not his personal past, but his evolutionary past:

opposite Knight's eyes was an imbedded fossil, standing forth in low relief from the rock. It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him. It was one of the early crustaceans called Trilobites. Separated by millions of years in their lives, Knight and this underling seemed to have met in their death. It was the single instance within his reach of vision of anything that had ever been alive and had had a body to save, as he himself had now. (213)

In a sense, this is astounding. Hardy is one of the first writers of fiction, I would argue, to tap into the new way of seeing that the discoveries of the nineteenth century had to offer. His treatment of scale here reminds me of that of H. G. Wells, except that Wells was using it in science fiction. (Some have argued that Hardy is an sf writer, including Brian Aldiss, and I see what they're getting at, but I feel like it broadens the term to the point of uselessness.) Hardy, like Wells, sees in the million-year timescale of life on Earth, a towering insignificance. Knight might have millions of years on the trilobite, but he's just as liable to die in this cliffside, and just as unable to see anything. Hardy himself would revisit the idea of cosmic insignificance in Two on a Tower, there demonstrated by the vastness of space, but here it comes from the vastness of time.

Well, kind of. There's only one thing within his field of vision, but Knight turns out to have more scientific training than I gave him credit for earlier: "Knight was a geologist; and such is the supremacy of habit over occasion, as a pioneer of thoughts of men, that at this dreadful juncture his mind found time to take in, by a momentous sweep, the varied scenes that had had their day between this creature's epoch and his own" (214). So all of a sudden he sees the span of history extending backward from him: primitive cavemen, mastodons, iguanodons, flying reptiles, "fishy beings of lower development," all the way to the trilobite. And then his thoughts rebound to the present and his burgeoning relationship with Elfride.

From here, his thoughts seem to alternate between pondering on his perilous situation and on his hopes with Elfride. Does he love her? Will he survive? These two questions merge into one by the end of his ordeal, I would argue: "he thought – he could not help thinking – that his death would be a deliberate loss to earth of good material; that such an experiment in killing might have been practised upon some less developed life" (217). In this way the cosmic becomes the personal; he will demonstrate his fitness to belong to the evolutionary chain he observed in his mind's eye by surviving and thus (probably) reproducing. If he does not die, then he will be the next part of the chain.

He does survive, because of Elfride, who removes her clothes and fashions them into a rope to pull him up off the cliff. In the midst of this, he manages to ogle her in her undergarments: "There is nothing like a thorough drenching for reducing the protruberances of clothes, but Elfride's seemed to cling to her like a glove" (218). So there we have "the male gaze," which is yet another way of seeing the world, and one Hardy is also often attentive to in his writing. But could he have held on, or she risked so much to save him, without the sexual pull between them? Their love and their sexual desire ends up proving his evolutionary fitness. (Well, kind of. Because this is a Thomas Hardy novel the relationship of course does not end well.)

So Knight's scientific perspective, slight though it might be, ends up being his salvation when it merges with his sexual desire. He defies his understanding of his own cosmic insignificance to find a reason to survive, and in doing so, cements his feelings toward Elfride. There's a lot more you could say about this scene, and I think I've gone on enough, but it's a tremendous example of the way the scientific discoveries of the Victorian era reshaped our perceptions and thoughts. Hardy was one of the first to capture that, and one of the best.

* Can we read anything into the fact that Hardy wrote a novel where a woman chooses between male suitors just a year after Darwin argues humanity was unique among the animals because men choose women instead of the other way around?

Review: Two on a Tower by Thomas Hardy

Trade paperback, 296 pages
Published 1996 (originally 1882)

Acquired October 2012
Read January 2013

Two on a Tower: A Romance
by Thomas Hardy

Most of the major Victorian novelists, as I am fond of pointing out, wrote one scientist novel: Dickens, Eliot, Gaskell, Collins, Kingsley, Trollope. Thomas Hardy, I am even fonder of pointing out, wrote three. Two on a Tower, his 1882 astronomer romance, was the middle one, following his 1872 geologist romance A Pair of Blue Eyes and preceding his 1887 amateur naturalist romance The Woodlanders. If we were to trace a trajectory of Hardy's opinions on science as way of seeing across them (a somewhat risky critical move, perhaps), we see that Hardy grows more pessimistic across the fifteen years (as Hardy seemingly did about everything).

While science is largely incidental in A Pair of Blue Eyes and while the scientist in The Woodlanders is a monster, Two on a Tower is somewhere in between in its depiction of a romance between Swithin St. Cleeve, the young astronomer, and Lady Viviette Constantine, an older married woman. Swithin finds beauty in the stars, but his elevated vision struggles to see Viviette's beauty on Earth-- even though she sees his quite clearly. Then, when he does shift his perception in order to see her, he loses sight of the stars that gave him so much wonder. And this being Hardy, nothing can ever work out correctly. This is my favorite of Hardy's three scientist novels: you really want this romance to work out, but know it never can, and there's beautiful imagery and some great ideas. The universe is unforgiving, and so is Thomas Hardy.

Review: Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

I was going to try to make some kind of link between Tess Durbeyfield and River Song, but being women is pretty much all they have in common. I guess they both die? Anyway, I have a review up of series two of The Diary of River Song.

Trade paperback, 518 pages
Published 2003 (originally 1891)
Previously read January and February 2010
Acquired June 2014
Reread October 2014

Tess of the D'Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy

As I skim back through my old lesson plans to write up my most recent reread of Tess of the D'Urbervilles, which took place in the context of teaching it, I'm impressed by the number of significant ideas and themes I took note of: evolution, history, women's roles, rape and sexual coercion, truth and selfhood, hidden psychology, and social forces are the ones I noted down-- of course there are many others, too. There's a lot going on in this novel, and you could write papers (or blog posts and blog posts; this is my third) and papers on it and only scratch the surface.

What always impresses about Hardy is his ability to link the cultural to the psychological. (I guess this is really what naturalism is all about, and he was probably its foremost British practitioner.) We perfectly understand the sometimes poor choices that Tess makes, both on the level of the cultural forces operating on her (Victorian society of course had a lot of expectations for the way women should act, which didn't always accord with what they encountered in the real world), and on the level of individual psychology (Tess always has a perfectly good reason to do what she does-- and somehow so does Angel and even Alec!). My students and I came up with the idea of "active passivity" to sum up Tess: she seems to never do anything... but not doing something often requires enormous force of will on her part. She puts so much work into not reacting so that she can fulfill what society expects of her. She's a victim of herself and her circumstances, in a way that really only a Victorian novel can depict.

Victorian Obscenity: Return to Christminster

Trade paperback, 451 pages
Published 1998 (content: 1894-95)
Acquired November 2006
Previously read September 2007 and March 2010
Reread May 2012

Jude the Obscure
by Thomas Hardy

Is three times in five years too much for one book?  Maybe.  I found myself less invested this time out.  "But nobody did come, because nobody does" is still the saddest sentence in literature, though.  On this read, I found myself much more aggravated by Sue than I have been in the past.  Figure out what you want, geeze!

Victorian Controversies, 1879-90: Modernization

Mass market paperback, 250 pages
Published 1979 (contents: 1879-90)
Acquired December 2007
Read September 2011

Wessex Tales: That Is to Say, The Three Strangers, A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four, The Melancholy Hussar, The Withered Arm, Fellow-townsmen, Interlopers at the Knap, The Distracted Preacher

by Thomas Hardy

"The Three Strangers"

Dang, this story is good.  I've read it three times, now, I think, and every time is just as good as the last.  A late-night celebration in a rural village is perfectly evoked, and then it's upset by a succession of visiting strangers.  It could be a ghost story, so perfect is the atmosphere... but it's not.  I'm loathe to say anything else about it, because that would dampen the impact I think.  (Well, maybe not if I can love it three times through.  Go and read it anyway; I'm sure it's free somewhere on-line.)

"A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four"
This is a little folktale that Hardy recounts about Napoleon, except that apparently he invented it.  Nice enough, but it didn't leave much of an impact. 

"The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion"
A Wessex woman falls in love with a York Hussar stationed in her village.  It's Thomas Hardy, so everything goes horribly wrong.  Again, this didn't impact me much.

"The Withered Arm"
Ah, this is more like it.  A touch of fantasy drives this story of a jilted lover, a witch, and a new wife.  Haunting, you know, and all the good things a bit of the supernatural should do.  Did Hardy write more supernatural stuff?  I don't really know, but I think he'd be good at it; he's morbid enough in the real world.

"Fellow-townsmen"
This story is like being punched in the face repeatedly by tragedy and miscommunication.  As always, Hardy makes you like it.  The ending just twists the knife more.

"Interlopers at the Knap"
One of the weaker stories in the volume, though I can't put my finger on why.

"The Distracted Preacher"
I liked this one a lot.  If it wasn't for "The Three Strangers," this would be the standout in the book; thankfully, it ends on a high note anyway.  It's probably the funniest story here (the poor preacher does not know how to deal with his rum-running lover), though of course nothing can stay good for long in Wessex.  Hardy's deft hand with characterization makes the tragedy work.  I am always depressed for having read Thomas Hardy, but happy for having been depressed.