Hardy, Thomas - Angelique Richardson (essay date May 1998)
Angelique Richardson (essay date May 1998)
SOURCE: Richardson, Angelique. “‘How I Mismated Myself for Love of You!’1: The Biologization of Romance in Hardy's A Group of Noble Dames.” Thomas Hardy Journal 14, no. 2 (May 1998): 59-76.
[In the following essay, Richardson investigates the impact of science—especially ideas of mating and hereditary—on Hardy's A Group of Noble Dames.]
The pedigrees of our county families, arranged in diagrams on the pages of country histories, mostly appear at first sight to be as barren of any touch of nature as a table of logarithms. But given a clue—the faintest tradition of what went on behind the scenes, and this dryness as of dust may be transformed into a palpitating drama.
(ND [A Group of Noble Dames] preface xi)
In the late nineteenth century, new biological discourses breathed life into dry parchment and bones,...
[The entire page is 9601 words long]
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