Angelique Richardson

Hardy and Biology

Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life was published in November 1859. Sold out before it even reached the shelves, it shook Victorian Britain. George Eliot and G. H. Lewes began reading it immediately, concluding within two days that it made ‘an epoch’.1 A second edition was rushed out for January 1860, and a pirated American edition of 3,000 sold out almost immediately. Looking back from 1907, the scholar and writer Edmund Gosse, Hardy’s close friend (and pall-bearer at his funeral) remarked in Father and Son: A Study of Two Temperaments: ‘this was the great moment in the history of thought when the theory of the mutability of species was preparing to throw a flood of light upon all departments of human speculation and action’.2 The Origin’s conclusions seemed inescapable. Life on earth was not the six-day product of a divine creator, but the outcome of random evolutionary process, and the theomorphic status of humanity was anything but certain. Man ‘was born yesterday - he will perish tomorrow’, declared the Athenaeum in the month The Origin appeared.3 Hardy, who declared that ‘as a young man he had been among the earliest acclaimers’ of The Origin of Species, and at the age of 41 attended Darwin’s funeral at Westminster Abbey,4 was moved to express the pain of an orphaned people, of objects in the world left wondering ‘why we find us here’: Has some Vast Imbecility Mighty to build and blend, But impotent to tend, Framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry?5

hardy and science: a chapter of accidents

Science was central to Victorian culture. Etymologically, science means knowledge, and central to Hardy’s work is the quest for knowledge in the broadest sense; for a deeper understanding of nature, of our place in it, and of ourselves, at a time when old certainties were crumbling, and new vistas of knowledge were jostling for attention. His notebooks are filled with discussion, comment and annotation of the new science. In 1917 he declared: I have repeatedly stated in prefaces and elsewhere that the views in [my works of art] are seemings, provisional impressions only, used for artistic purposes because they represent approximately the impressions of the age, and are plausible, till somebody produces better theories of the universe.1

‘People Talk a Lot of Nonsense about Heredity’: Mona Caird and Anti-Eugenic Feminism

In the words of the late nineteenth-century poet Elizabeth Sharp, Mona Caird’s opinions, though they were ‘met with acute hostility at the time, contributed a great deal to “altering the attitude of the public mind in its approach to and examination of [the woman question].”’3 Sharp dedicated her anthology of Victorian Women Poets to Caird, designating her ‘the most loyal and devoted advocate of the cause of woman’.4 I shall demonstrate in this essay the extent to which Caird exposed and opposed the repressive ideas which lay beneath the apparently emancipatory rhetoric of many of her feminist contemporaries.

After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind

After Darwin: Animals, Emotions, and the Mind explores questions of mind, emotion and the moral sense which Darwin opened up through his research on the physical expression of emotions and the human–animal relation. It also examines the extent to which Darwin’s ideas were taken up by Victorian writers and popular culture, from George Eliot to the Daily News .

Ambivalence in Hardy: A Study of His Attitude to Women (review)

AUTUMN 2001 seeks to situate her within the context of contemporary literary and social trends such as decadence, the emergence of the New Woman, and modern modes of advertisement and self-promotion. Refusing to place Corelli either in the camp of neoconservatives or iconoclasts, Federico wisely portrays her as a study in paradox: she was loved by readers and hated by critics; she achieved success in a male-dominated world yet abhorred the New Woman; she prized sexual purity, yet her books teemed with heated displays of sexual passion; she was anti-intellectual, yet she desperately strove to appear educated. What emerges is a portrait of a very complicated woman, and the most sophisticated scholarly treatment Corelli and her work have yet received. Federico’s approach to her subject is deliberately eclectic. Asserting that Corelli “defies reflexive categorization” (11), Federico uses a number of theoretical approaches, and strives to emphasize “the variety of directions [Corelli] offers for modern literary and cultural studies” (11). Her ultimate goal is to provide readers with “a starting point for their own inquiries” about Corelli (11). Accordingly, each chapter dwells on a different facet of the Corelli phenomenon. Chapter One explores Corelli’s techniques of self-representation and her participation in the burgeoning cult of celebrity; Chapter Two places Corelli within the contexts of aestheticism and literary decadence; Chapter Three explores Corelli’s vexed relationship with feminism; Chapter Four further develops this theme in the context of literary modernism; and the final chapter, “Who Was Marie Corelli?” discusses the ways in which Corelli was remembered and represented in the decades following her death. For the scholar seeking “a starting point” for his or her own research on Corelli, this is certainly a useful book. It also makes a compelling case for scholars of lateVictorian fiction to reconsider the ways in which New Woman and decadent fiction and its authors are generally defined and understood. The book has less to offer for the scholar or reader who seeks a coherent interpretation of Corelli. The book raises far more questions than it answers, and its eclectic approach (despite the strong case Federico makes for it) might frustrate some. She seems to channel-surf from theorist to theorist, inquiry to inquiry. Lest the reader become disoriented, Federico continually draws attention to her method (“In this chapter I am attempting X, Y, and Z”). Yet this continual selfreference only further distracts the reader. Both The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli and Idol of Suburbia make important scholarly contributions, although both might have delved a bit deeper into their respective lines of inquiry. All the more room, however, for further work on this fascinating novelist and her books. As Ransom and Federico aptly demonstrate, Marie Corelli is a topic too rich to be exhausted anytime soon. Maria LaMonaca Columbia College