From Far from the Madding Crowd to Anderby Wold: Assessing Thomas Hardy’s Legacy in Winifred Holtby’s Early Fiction
Although Winifred Holtby admired Virginia Woolf’s work, she seems to have disregarded her later injunction in A Room of One’s Own (1929) for women to think back through their mothers, to turn to her literary “father”, namely Thomas Hardy, who was still alive when she wrote Anderby Wold (1923). A con...
Na minha lista:
| Publicado no: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/fathom, |
|---|---|
| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado em: |
FATHOM
2026
|
| Assuntos: | |
| Acesso em linha: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Resumo: | Although Winifred Holtby admired Virginia Woolf’s work, she seems to have disregarded her later injunction in A Room of One’s Own (1929) for women to think back through their mothers, to turn to her literary “father”, namely Thomas Hardy, who was still alive when she wrote Anderby Wold (1923). A contemporary of D. H. Lawrence, Holtby (1898-1935) is usually presented as a regional writer. Her most popular novel, South Riding (1936), can be said to bear the trace of Hardy’s fictional geography since her favourite territory is like Hardy’s Wessex, “a partly real, partly dream-country”. This paper would like to go beyond this mere kinship and probe Hardy’s influence on Holtby, generally mentioned in passing, and see what this writer of the interwar may owe to the Victorian writer. It will shift the focus to a lesser-known novel, Anderby Wold (1923), Holtby’s first novel, set in rural Yorkshire and dealing with the agricultural world at the turn of the century. We will first see how the novel resonates with Far from the Madding Crowd by identifying intertextual traces of Hardy’s novel in Anderby Wold and show how acknowledging Hardy’s legacy may colour our reading of the novel. Capturing the influence of Hardy’s fiction, literary devices and values will open the way to an assessment of what the rural and the regional mean for Holtby. Hardy’s enduring legacy will be measured in the process. |
|---|