Guest review: Julia Jarman rediscovers Thomas Hardy, in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

"Looking back, I see that Thomas Hardy has been giving me life lessons and writing lessons for many years ... "

Julia Jarman, a regular contributor to Writers Review, has been writing children’s books for forty years, and still is. Recently, though, she turned her hand to ‘golden years’ women’s fiction and The Widows' Wine Club was the happy result, followed by Widows on the Wine Path and Windows Waive the Rules; she is currently at work on the fourth title.

My off-on relationship with Thomas Hardy has lasted a long time. I was underwhelmed by Under the Greenwood Tree when I read it at school, and by The Trumpet Major, though I liked that, or rather the eponymous hero, a bit more. Miss Lemmon was keen on Hardy, and even keener on Jane Austen, but I didn’t like Jane either. My early-teenage self scorned Pride and Prejudice as trivial and much preferred an author called Frank G Slaughter who wrote hospital romances, with handsome surgeons wielding knives, and from whom I learned about full frontal lobotomies. (Which led to my appreciation of the joke, if joke it is, that I would rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy. Thank you, Frank.)

I came to adore Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. They both appealed to my more mature teenage self who was outraged by injustice and loved a good cry. This lasted into my twenties and Tess and Jude are still on my bookshelf – or so I thought till I checked. They weren’t, but Under the Greenwood Tree, The Trumpet Major – filched from school! - The Woodlanders and Far From the Madding Crowd were. I began to question my memory and when I thumbed the pages of The Trumpet Major and saw that the name of the hero was John Loveday I started to think that Thomas Hardy had had a bigger influence on me than I have given him credit for, and that I liked him a lot more than I remembered. I have used the name Loveday for one of my own male heroes!

I do know I’ve changed a lot over the years. Somewhere along the line I joined the mass of humanity who cannot bear too much reality, and prefer to laugh rather than cry. I do not need to be reminded of all the injustice in the world, is my excuse. I want to escape from it in the pages of a book. Call me shallow if you like, but though I prefer realism to fantasy, I like a bit of uplift with it, and Hardy doesn’t deliver.

Was I unduly influenced by the critic, F R Leavis, popular in my youth, who declared Hardy second-rate? He didn’t include him in the select group of writers he thought to be in ‘the great tradition’ of the British novel, thinking the hand of Fate too heavy in his melodramatic plots. I share the view that the more satisfying novels have plot arising from character, and I remembered the hand of destiny being much too evident in Hardy. Maybe that’s why I felt justified not-reading him and we lost touch.

Till recently.

Fortunately my friend, Celia Rees, re-introduced us, and reminded me, even before the Loveday discovery, that he has never been as far away as I thought. It came about when Celia read my work in progress, The Widows’ Wine and Book Club, fourth in my Widows series, and, referring to a certain incident, she said, ‘That’s straight out of Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd to be precise.’

OMG! I had to re-read it on Kindle – I was away from home - to see if I had committed a dastardly act of plagiarism or a commendable act of post-modern intertextuality. Re-read it, note, though at that moment I couldn’t remember ever reading it. In my own defence my first read was over fifty years ago. When I got home I found my copy, a 1968 Pan edition with a photo of Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, on the cover. Inside, on the first page, was Gabriel Oak with whom I instantly fell in love, or re-fell, like the twenty-something me who first read it, and I kept reading. It was nothing like I remembered – or didn’t remember – but I must have absorbed it and I hope learned a thing or two.

What a story!

Hardy plunges straight in. No long preamble. We meet the hero and then the heroine – he’s watching her sitting on top of an overloaded cart - and the story starts to unfold. He writes vividly. He shows us that in small country places, far from the madding crowds, passions fly high in ‘ordinary’ people, that ordinary people are extraordinary. The descriptions of the Dorset countryside are done with more economy than I misremembered, enhancing the story not overwhelming it. I saw no sign of the heavy hand of Fate. Everything arises from character in this novel, and he creates brilliant characters. Bathsheba is a wonderfully realistic heroine, passionate, impulsive, vain, competent, and in a crucial incident, that incident, she is careless of another person’s feelings and so heedless of the consequences, that I expected tragedy, which there is for some. Gabriel Oak is a convincing thoroughly decent man, a thoroughly human man with faults and virtues, who rises to heroism. Farmer Boldwood is another thoroughly decent man, tragically lacking in insight, and Sergeant Troy is an all too believable s***, an attractive s*** to some, but not me.

Sorry, but spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know. I’ll write it tiny to help you, but it isn’t a tragedy, there’s a happy ending, a happy ending from Hardy. I loved it and highly recommend! Looking back, I see that Thomas Hardy has been giving me life lessons and writing lessons for many years. So kiss me, Hardy! Thank you!

Far from the Madding Crowd is published by Vintage Classics.