Thomas Hardy Writing Style

A young sheepdog, keen and useless, drives Gabriel Oak's flock through a gap and over the edge of a chalk pit. The ewes go over in the dark. Oak is ruined before breakfast. The dog had done exactly what it was bred to do, and Hardy has it shot the same morning, which is as close to a verdict as he permits himself anywhere in the opening act of Far from the Madding Crowd.

Bathsheba Everdene sends Boldwood a valentine to fill a dull Sunday and picks the seal without much thought. It reads MARRY ME. Boldwood, who had not looked at her once, now looks at nothing else. No fate is invoked. A bored woman, a stick of sealing wax, and a man with no practice at being wanted, and the machine is already turning.

Egdon Heath opens The Return of the Native before any person does, and it goes on behaving like one afterwards. Mrs Yeobright crosses it in August heat to make peace with her son. The distance is real distance. She is turned from his door by a wife with a reason of her own for not opening it, she starts back, and between the heat, the miles and an adder she does not survive the walk. Emily Brontë's moor broods and withholds. Hardy's heath keeps time. It decides how long a walk takes, who can be watched crossing it, and what becomes of a woman already spent.

The standing charge against him is coincidence, and half of it lands. Tess pushes her confession under Angel Clare's door on the eve of the wedding, the paper goes beneath the carpet and stays there unread, and her whole marriage turns on that hinge. Set it beside the furmity woman. She laces Henchard's basin with rum in the first chapter of The Mayor of Casterbridge, before he auctions his wife at the fair, and years afterwards she is hauled up in his own courtroom and names him from the dock. Same trick, twice. One was paid for in advance. The other is a door left conveniently ajar, and reading Hardy well starts with telling the two apart.

The survey map

Hardy fixes sight lines, gradients and travel times before he needs them, then spends them. Tess walks to Emminster to beg Angel's parents for help, changes into lighter boots and hides the walking pair under a hedge, finds the vicarage empty because the family is at church, and overhears the brothers discover the boots and take them for a tramp's leavings. She turns round and walks home. The reversal runs on footwear and a service timetable. Build the scene as a diagram, delete every measurement that fails to change a decision, and what survives reads as atmosphere to a reader who has not seen the diagram.

The debt ledger

Each scene closes a little further into debt. Henchard owes a wife he auctioned, an oath he swore in a church, and a daughter he is raising under a false understanding of who she is, and the novel is the schedule on which those fall due. Wharton keeps comparable books on old New York, where the currency is invitations and the penalty is a quiet excision from the list. Hardy's currency is coarser: work, credit, marriage, and whether the town will serve you at the counter. Keep your own ledger open beside the draft, and the ending stops being something you have to invent under pressure.

The village chorus

A group of minor characters exists to price things. The malthouse men in Far from the Madding Crowd and the choir in Under the Greenwood Tree gossip about wages, weather and marriages, and while they do it they publish the going rate for a reputation, which spares the narrator from explaining it. The chorus can also move. In The Mayor of Casterbridge it builds two effigies, walks them under Lucetta's window, and the talk becomes the thing that kills her. Gossip with a route through town is not background, and Hardy hands the route to people whose names the reader has known since the first chapter.

The delay engine

Distance and paper do the work a villain does elsewhere. A letter arrives after the decision it was written to prevent. A woman waits at one church while the man waits at another. A horse dies on a night road because a girl fell asleep driving her father's load to market, and a family loses its only means of trade inside a paragraph. Hardy times these things so the reader can see the collision coming from much further off than any character can, and the dread that produces is slower and more useful than surprise. Malice from anybody is optional throughout.

The plain closing clause

After the warm paragraph comes a short one made of fact. Hardy lets a scene build to real tenderness, then sets a flat sentence beside it: a distance, a date, a legal condition, something the character has not been told. Henchard's will closes the novel that way, a brief list of prohibitions in a dying man's hand, ending on a request that no man remember him. Not one adjective in it does any emotional work. The reader supplies all the feeling, which is exactly why it holds, and of everything Hardy does this is the most portable into prose that looks nothing like his.

The collision built in advance

The Convergence of the Twain sets a liner and an iceberg growing toward each other for years while neither party suspects the other exists, and the poem is the clearest statement Hardy ever made of what he does in prose. A catastrophe of his is two lines that have been converging since a chapter you barely registered. Build both lines separately. Give each an ordinary reason to be moving, keep them apart on the page for as long as you can bear, and let the reader see them approach before the characters manage it. Surprise is cheap and lasts a page. Convergence is expensive, and it produces what readers mean when they call an ending inevitable.

Dramatic irony

You see the seal before Boldwood does. Bathsheba's valentine was a way of getting through a wet Sunday, and Hardy shows you the choosing of it, so that when Boldwood props the envelope on his mantelpiece and cannot stop returning to it, you are watching a man build the rest of his life on a mistake you personally saw being made. The device buys tension without a villain and without a chase. It also shields the character from your contempt, since you know how reasonable the misreading looks from where he stands. What it costs is patience. Hardy has to hold the gap between what you know and what Boldwood knows wide open for hundreds of pages, and he refuses to close it early.

Free indirect discourse

Hardy slips into a character's grammar without warning and slips back out again. A sentence about Henchard will begin as report and finish in Henchard's own vocabulary, carrying his self-justification inside the narrator's voice, so the pull of the excuse reaches you before you notice it is an excuse. Coming back out is the harder half of the trick. Hardy tends to exit through a flat clause of fact, which lands like a light being switched on. Sustained over a chapter, this produces the effect his imitators want and seldom get, sympathy and judgment running through the same paragraph with neither one cancelling the other.

The object that returns

A caged goldfinch arrives on a doorstep as a wedding present and the paper around it stays on. Henchard walks out of Casterbridge. The bird is found afterwards, starved in its cage under a bush, and an awkward small gift turns into the plainest declaration of feeling the man makes in the whole novel. Hardy plants objects as furniture and collects them as evidence. The reader met the thing while it meant nothing, which is why its later meaning feels discovered rather than delivered. All the discipline sits in the planting, because a detail introduced with any emphasis announces itself and spoils its own return.

Pathetic fallacy on a short leash

Troy plants flowers on Fanny Robin's grave at night, in something close to remorse. A gargoyle on the church tower discharges rainwater onto that exact spot and washes the planting out before morning. Ruskin would have read the scene as feeling projected onto stone, and Hardy has arranged it so that the stone does no such thing. The gutter is a gutter. A mason cut it to solve a drainage problem long before Troy was born, and it happens to empty where he chose to kneel. That is the leash. Weather and architecture obey physics here, and the meaning arrives out of the collision rather than out of the sky agreeing with somebody.

Wet weather standing in for a wet mood

The imitation starts with rain on the day of the funeral and stops there. Charles Baxter calls this the fallacy of the objective correlative, a setting that can only mirror the character, and it leaves a reader nothing to learn from the view. Hardy's weather changes what is possible. Rain makes a lane impassable and a message late. Heat kills a woman on an open heath. Frost turns a swede field into piecework that pays worse by the hour. Ask of each weather sentence what it forbids or permits, and if the answer is nothing at all, you have written a mood ring and given it four lines of description.

Dropping in a coincidence without paying for it

Writers finish Tess of the d'Urbervilles, conclude that Hardy allowed himself chance, and grant themselves more of it. The letter under the carpet is the passage critics have circled for generations, and it survives at all because everything around it has been argued for line by line. Imitators borrow the licence and skip the argument. What comes out is a plot that changes direction because its author needed a change of direction, which a reader detects at once even when they cannot name what went wrong. Hardy's defence is in the same books, in the returns he set up chapters or whole volumes ahead of the payment.

Dialect worn as a costume

Hardy tells you early that Tess speaks two dialects, the one she uses at home and the schoolroom English she uses with anyone above her, and that fact goes to work much later, when the men judging her have heard only the second. Imitators catch the rustic vowels and go phonetic. Apostrophes multiply, the reader drops to decoding speed, and the workfolk turn into scenery that tells jokes. Decide scene by scene what a listener concludes about a speaker from how the speaker talks, and what that conclusion costs in work, credit or marriage. Then write the dialect thin enough to be heard without stopping.

Stacking misery instead of building hope first

The lazy reading files Hardy under gloom, so the imitation opens grim and gets grimmer. That misses the place where the pain is manufactured. Hardy spends most of his length on people who plan, court, save and apply. Jude teaches himself Greek from a book propped on a bread cart for years before Christminster gets round to answering him, and the refusal only bites because the ambition was specific, patient and reasonable. Load a draft with misery from the first page and a reader adjusts to the level within a chapter, stops paying attention to the increments, and puts it down half read.