[In the following review, Boas describes Chase's analysis of Thomas Hardy's censorship of a number of his serialized novels.]

This book [Thomas Hardy from Serial to Novel] is a valuable study of the changes which Thomas Hardy made in The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure to render them acceptable to the taste of the magazine readers of the eighties. In all three the serial versions were bowdlerized so that no Victorian could take offense. The changes are often meticulous, sometimes far-reaching, and always with an eye to the prudish decencies. And they are sometimes astonishingly drastic as in Tess where the magazine version omits the episode of the seduction, an episode which is “the motivating incident of the story.” Jude the Obscure naturally suffers most.

Miss Chase points out the important issue, “how far are we justified in condemning Hardy's literary ethics?” To answer this question she summarizes in four pages the progress of “realism” in the nineteenth century novel. She then places Hardy “above all preceding or contemporary English realists,” and maintains that he “belied his own philosophy of life.” The only defense which Miss Chase can present is Hardy's statement that he, like all novelists of his time, was “the slave of stolid circumstance” and that without the approval of the magazines and the circulating libraries he could not have received a hearing. One can believe his statement when one finds a contemporary reviewer referring to the complete version of Jude in such terms as “outrageous lubricities,” “rancid revelations,” and “a bundle of flash stories.”