Thomas Hardy's Medieval Mind
The LRB Podcast
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The Struggle of Elfride
Hardy was very conscious of his own passivity. His inability to operate exactly in the way in which Steven does operate, doesn't operate at that particular moment. There's a conflict in Hardy between these rather passive, sensitive men that you get in his fiction. And they are in the novel works because he's neither Steven nor Knight or a mixture of Knight and Steven. The question is to what extent is Hardy writing realist fiction.
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