‘by selection, do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are Utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritances are thoroughly known. All do good service who aid towards this end’.⁶ Earlier in this work Darwin cited Arthur Schopenhauer: ‘the final aim of all love intrigues, be they comic or tragic, is really of more importance than all other ends in human life … it is not the weal or woe of any one individual, but that of the human race to come, which is here at stake’.⁷ The love-plot, habitual to the Victorian novel, suddenly mattered to evolutionary scientists. In the decades that followed, ideas of inheritance were increasingly at large in literature, generating new ontological narratives.⁸ This paper considers ways in which Hardy's A Group of Noble Dames (1891),⁹ published at a time when the reputation and writing of fiction was in a state of transition, registers and exploits the encounter between science and romance.

In her sociological account of the ways in which men supplanted women as novelists in the last third of the nineteenth century, Gaye Tuchman, drawing largely on the London archives of Macmillan and Company, documents changing attitudes towards romance on the part of publishers, publishers' readers and an elite male coterie of reviewers.¹⁰ While it is possible to see the hostile review by Henry Knight of Elfride Swancourt's romance (The Court of King Arthur's Castle: A Romance of Lyonnesse) in A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872-3) as paralleling publishers' and reviewers' treatment of Hardy,¹¹ Hardy's contention that Knight bore biographical resemblance to himself suggests his perception of his relations with the publishing industry was more complex.¹² Hardy was determined to be part of the literary world and yet sufficiently peripheral (and rebuffed) to be aloof. Tuchman demonstrates how the Macmillan reader John Morley, and his successors, identified men with ideals capable of having an impact upon the mind with activity and the production orientation associated with high culture. In the period of “male invasion” (identified by Tuchman as taking place between 1840 and 1879), “Morley was actively engaged in excluding the romance—that form cultivated by women—from acceptable culture”¹³ and as part of this process he redefined the novel “by stressing realism and insistently distinguishing it from the earlier romances associated with women writers”.¹⁴

Lyn Pykett has opened up further the late nineteenth-century debates around fiction. She argues that there was not simply a battle between the sexes, rather “a battle … waged on the terrain of gender, it was part of a contest about the meaning of gender and about and by whom gender is to be defined”.¹⁵ Pykett demonstrates that Naturalism and the New Realism, two significant areas of innovation in late nineteenth-century fiction, were in part attempts to masculinize the novel, just as Elaine Showalter has argued that the revival of romance by male writers in the 1890s was part of the move to turn the novel into male form, as the heterosexual romance of “courtship, manners and marriage” was replaced with “the masculine and homosocial ‘romance’ of adventure and quest”.¹⁶

Most recently, Peter McDonald has analysed the material and sociohistorical conditions of “the literary field” in the 1890s.¹⁷ He notes how Edmund Gosse, in lamenting the effects on literature of democracy, and of a readership composed in the main of women (particularly young married women), exempted writers such as Hardy, George Meredith and Henry James from his criticism by arguing that “it is probably to the approval of male readers that most eminent novelists owe that prestige which ultimately makes them favourites of the women”. When Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) came under anonymous fire in the Saturday Review he assured Hardy “you have strengthened your position tremendously, among your own confrères and the serious male public”.¹⁸

What these sociological and literary accounts have in common is the identification of a fin de siècle flux in fiction. Fiction, historically and culturally bound to romance,¹⁹ was clearly under pressure from a number of directions, as Naturalism, New Realism and Proto-modernism competed for textual space. I would stress, also, the role that biology played in broadening the franchise of fictional possibilities at this time—and not simply in terms of a more open treatment of sex, and sexual relations, but in broader portrayals of life, love and heredity. Whether or not Gosse was correct in his assumption that Hardy had a serious, male following, biology was no bad way of acquiring one; like all (male) discourses of science, it was serious stuff.

Romance would have to be rewritten—laced with realism—if it was to rise above the lowly status it had reached in face of new literary prejudice. Hardy's relationship to realism was a complicated one;²⁰ he was a firm disbeliever in “photographic realism”, which he saw as an obstacle to higher truths. Love was his passion, lending itself perhaps more to romance than realism. Nonetheless, it was a passion which, with its affinities both with literary tradition and the new biological discourses on relations between the sexes, he was to turn to considerable advantage. As Havelock Ellis put it, Hardy “is less a story-teller than an artist who has intently studied certain phases of passion, and brings us a simple and faithful report of what he has found”.²¹ In his first letter to Alexander Macmillan, of 1868, Hardy had declared: “no fiction will considerably interest readers poor or rich unless the passion of love forms a prominent feature in the thread of the story”.²² Biology would provide him with a palatable route to realism, and a novel spin on romance. As he wrote in the New Review in 1890, the year in which six of the stories in A Group of Noble Dames were first published, “life being a physiological fact, its honest portrayal must be largely concerned with, for one thing, the relations between the sexes, and the substitution for such catastrophes as favour the false colouring best expressed by the regulation finish that ‘they married and were happy ever after,’ of catastrophes upon sexual relations as it is”.²³ In an interview with Raymond Blathwayt in Black and White two years later he reiterated the point: “I do feel very strongly that the position of men and women in nature, things which everyone is thinking, and nobody saying, may be taken up and treated frankly. Until lately novelists have been obliged to arrange situations and dènouements which they knew to be indescribably unreal, but dear to the heart of the amiable library subscriber. See how this ties the hands of a writer who is forced to make his characters act unnaturally, in order that he may produce the spurious effect of their being in harmony with social forms and ordinances.”²⁴

Hardy's interest in contemporary scientific ideas is undisputed.²⁵ An attendant at Darwin's funeral in Westminster, he declared himself one of “the earliest acclaimers of the Origin”.²⁶ He was quick to see the implications of Darwin's theories beyond the world of science: “Darwinism is as fruitful in its bearing upon sociology as in its bearing upon natural history”.²⁷ Likewise, his interest in genealogy is self-evident, and well-established.²⁸ However, his interest in eugenic discourses has largely been neglected.²⁹ Hardy was fascinated by the possibilities of biological determinism, exploiting its creative possibilities. Peter Widdowson has underscored an “obsession” with social class and gender relations in Hardy's “minor” novels which forces these elements in the “major” ones into much greater prominence.³⁰ This interest in hierarchical relations of class and gender, which predominates in A Group of Noble Dames, links the stories to ideas of degeneracy and eugenics which were in the air at the Victorian fin de siècle. Romance in A Group of Noble Dames is punctuated by ideas of Darwinian sexual selection and concerns about breeding (a conflation of the social and the biological). However, Hardy's ideological position is elusive, both in these tales³¹ and in general, and can be seen as exemplified by his poem, “The Pedigree” (1916), which explores the tension between heredity and individual will, without apparently committing itself to either. Publicly conceding biological determinism—“I am merest mimicker and counterfeit”—the speaker privately steels himself against the forces of heredity: “I am I / And what I do I do myself alone”. Through the paradox of the poem the possibilities of eugenics are at once acknowledged and resisted.³²

In A Group of Noble Dames, Hardy spices up the romance plot by drawing on evolutionary discourses on love and sex. Unified by a concern with genealogy, the ten (anti-)romances are refracted through a wide range of (male) narrative voices. The first eight tales are located in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and thus enjoy an ostensible distance both from contemporary romance and biologized narratives of sexual selection. By way of contrast, the ninth tale takes place only fifty years previous to, and the tenth is set in, the narrator's present. Elements of absurdity, which run through the collection, are made relatively unobtrusive through the temporal distance of the first eight.³³

In one sense, A Group of Noble Dames takes its place in a long and honourable literary tradition; the use of story-telling as a pretext for a framed narrative harks back to Boccacio's Decameron,³⁴ Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and The Thousand and One Nights.³⁵ But the tales gesture equally towards an innovative, framed but fragmented form which repeatedly draws attention to its own oral immediacy and plural status and, like other literary experiments of the 1890s, suggested that the days of the “three-decker novel” were numbered and that the single authorial voice was waning. Hardy had a strong sense of the historical development of literature: “narrative art is neither mature in its artistic aspect, nor in its ethical or philosophical aspect; neither in form nor in substance. To me, at least, the difficulties of perfect presentation in both these kinds appear of such magnitude that the utmost which each generation can be expected to do is to add one or two strokes towards the selection and shaping of a possible ultimate perfection”.³⁶ Writing, self-consciously, in time, Hardy borrows here from the voguish register of natural selection (the progressive spin which he gives it, and which Darwin did not, challenges popular conceptions of Hardy as a pessimist).

By gaining the undivided attention of a socially disparate audience, each story in A Group of Noble Dames seems, at least for its duration, to have triumphed in the struggle for expression, but each is met by a chorus of debate from which the next is apparently spontaneously generated, and which, in producing a variation on whatever theme has gone before, has implications for its predecessor.³⁷ In this way, A Group of Noble Dames becomes a microcosm of evolutionary history. Each of the (contemporary) narrators belongs to the Wessex Field and Antiquarian Club, “an inclusive and intersocial” club with broad and broadly scientific interests (ND 42; 131);³⁸ weather-bound for a day, they pass the time in telling stories. At times the tales seem scarcely mediated utterances, but on occasion we are reminded that what follows is “only an approximation” (ND 121) or simply the “substance” (ND 107) of the original version. However, rather than bringing a disciplining authorial presence to bear, this qualification, by adding a further layer of narration, serves to underscore the multivocality of the collection. This multivocality is brought home by the dialogic relationship which the tales enjoy with each other. For example, child adoption is celebrated in the third tale, “The Marchioness of Stonehenge” where emotional ties count for more than economic or biological capital: “flesh and blood's nothing” declares Milly, as her adopted son (he is known only as “Milly's Boy”) chooses her in preference to his “corporeal” mother. In “Lady Mottisfont”, the next tale in the sequence, Dorothy (who was discovered in “a patch of wild oats”) happily swaps her adoptive for her biological mother “with a strange and instinctive readiness that intimated the wonderful subtlety of the threads which bind flesh and flesh together” (ND 100). But the biological tie gains only temporary ascendance before it falls victim to social law; both parentage and adoption are exposed as unreliable forms of social security. The biological and adoptive mothers of Dorothy reject her when she stands in the way of social ambition, leaving her to be brought up by a “cottage-woman”. This was a theme that Hardy took up, and elaborated, in Jude the Obscure: when Jude Junior “seems to be wanted by nobody” Jude is provoked to declare “the beggarly question of parentage—what is it, after all? What does it matter, when you come to think of it, whether a child is yours by blood or not? All the little ones of our time are collectively the children of us adults of the time, and entitled to our general care.”³⁹ Adoption, more useful to Hardy for creative than ideological purposes, was a springboard for the exploration of the complex matrix of social, economic and biological ties.

Fittingly narrated by the Old Surgeon, the second tale in A Group of Noble Dames, “Barbara of the House of Grebe”, registers the entry of science (here, Lyellian geology) into the language and, ultimately, the practice, of romance—“a lover's heart after possession being comparable to the earth in its geologic stages, as described to us sometimes by our worthy President; first a hot coal, then a warm one, then a cooling cinder, then chilly—the simile shall be pursued no further” (ND 50). Later in the story, when the surgeon describes Edmond Willowes as “metamorphosed to a specimen of another species” (ND 61), he borrows from the register of Darwin's evolutionary theory of descent with modification. Scientific imagery pervades the collection; even the Rural Dean talks of passion “electrified back to life” (ND 76). Following the sixth tale, “Squire Petrick's Lady” (narrated by the Crimson Maltster), the audience exclaim “that such subtle and instructive psychological studies as this (now that psychology was so much in demand) were precisely the tales they desired, as members of a scientific club’ (ND 131). In this tale, Timothy Petrick ‘studied prints of the portraits of [the Dukes of Southwesterland], and then, like a chemist watching a crystallization, began to examine young Rupert's face for the unfolding of those historic curves and shades that the painters Vandyke and Lely had perpetuated on canvas” (ND 127-128). The convergence of art and biology promises to inscribe itself on the illegitimate boy's body. But Petrick is disappointed: instead the boy turns out “a fleshly reproduction of a wretched old uncle whose very name he wished to forget!” Biology trumps language: “the boy's Christian name, even, was an imposture and an irony, for it implied hereditary force and brilliancy to which he would plainly never attain” (ND 130). Earlier, in “Lady Mottisfont”, Dorothy's body gradually reveals her pedigree: the eponymous subject “had seen there not only her husband's traits, which she had often beheld before, but others, of the shade, shape, and expression which characterized those of her new neighbour” (ND 99). In the ninth tale, “The Duchess of Hamptonshire” (narrated by the Quiet Gentleman), the language of evolution resuscitates and animates the Duke of Hamptonshire's pictorial genealogy: he ascends to his picture-gallery with the express aim of spending some time considering “what an important part those specimens of womankind had played in the evolution of the Saxelby race” (ND 151, emphasis added). This interest in the vivid visibility of genealogy occurs elsewhere in Hardy's writing: when Tess encounters portraits of her foremothers we learn “her fine features were unquestionably traceable in these exaggerated forms”,⁴⁰ and the romance plot of A Laodicean (1881) is kindled, and inflamed, in a picture-gallery: “a new and romantic feeling that the De Stancys had stretched out a tentacle from their genealogical tree to seize her by the hand and draw her in to their mass took possession of Paula”.⁴¹

In “Barbara of the House of Grebe”, we learn that the eponymous heroine (who at this time was “a good and pretty girl”, and “hated other pretty women the very least possible” (ND 47)) has no romantic feeling for Lord Uplandtowers; his confidant gives him little cause for hope: “and as for thought of a good match, why, there's no more calculation in her than in a bird” (ND 46). Barbara loves and marries a suitor lower down in the social hierarchy: Willowes, “a young fellow of Shottsford-Forum—a widow-woman's son”; “Willowes's father, or grandfather, was the last of the old glass-painters in that place” (ND 49). She herself is the daughter of Sir John and Lady Grebe; “Sir John's was a baronetcy created a few years before the breaking out of the Civil War, and his lands were even more extensive than those of Lord Uplandtowers himself” (ND 46). The tale initially presents itself as a conventional love-match—“the young married lovers, caring no more about their blood than about ditch-water, were intensely happy” (ND 50). But Barbara is won over to selection for breeding: “now too, she was older, and admitted to herself that a man whose ancestor had run scores of Saracens through and through in fighting for the site of the Holy Sepulchre was a more desirable husband, socially considered, than one who could only claim with certainty to know that his father and grandfather were respectable burgesses” (ND 65). Following the death (“in a foreign land”) of the rejected Willowes, Barbara marries the persistent Lord Uplandtowers (who has exhibited cynical doggedness from the age of nineteen [ND 45]) in what is no less than the playing out of a biologically determined drama: “determination was hereditary in the bearers of that escutcheon” (ND 45).

However, Barbara retains intense sexual desire for her first husband, towards whom she had cooled socially (and, following his horrific disfigurement in a theatre fire in Venice—where she sent him to up his social credentials—physically), but whose sexual memory she cherishes long after his reported death. Following the arrival from Italy of a life-size statue of Willowes, Uplandtowers discovers her in her private recess, in a passionate embrace with the statue, “standing with her arms clasped tightly round the neck of Edmond, and her mouth on his” (ND 69). Significantly, her feelings of sexual desire thwart her capacity to breed; as Uplandtowers now realizes, it is her sexual passion that threatens to cut off his line: “this is where we evaporate—this is where my hopes of a successor in the title dissolve” (ND 69).

As Angus McLaren and Thomas Laqueur have argued, a one-sex model of humanity was gradually succeeded by a two-sex model during the course of the eighteenth century. This was accompanied by the replacement of the desiring female by the passive, undesiring Angel from the eighteenth century onwards.⁴² The emergence of preformation theories in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, both on the Continent and in Britain, attributed to woman a much more passive role than had the previous semence or two-seed theory. A general consensus emerged that the new creation of life required two distinct building blocks. This stress on difference increasingly underplayed the role of pleasure in the woman's procreative contribution. Only when Barbara becomes a dutiful, passive wife to Uplandtowers does she reproduce—she produces “no less than eleven children in the nine following years” (though only one survives premature death) (ND 75). Her attachment to him is one of servility, not sexual passion. “Cured” of the “disease” of desire (ND 74), Barbara is no longer barren (even if “the cure became so permanent as to be itself a new disease” [ND 74]).⁴³ Recently, Francesco Marroni has explained the deaths of her children as punishment for adultery, and with a man who is not of her class, and for her infatuation with an inanimate object.⁴⁴ However, these deaths can equally be seen as symptomatic of her location in the midst of an English aristocracy which was having increasing problems keeping up its numerical end. Round about the same time, Tess was lavishing care on her child, but as a child of the “belated seedling of an effete aristocracy” (Tess 302)⁴⁵ it stood little chance of surviving: “some such collapse had been probable, so tender and puny was its frame” (Tess 42). In similar vein, the partially blue-blooded Elfride in A Pair of Blue Eyes, connected to the aristocratic Luxellian family by birth and, later, by marriage too, dies of a miscarriage.⁴⁶ And, in the third tale, Lady Caroline's second marriage, to the Marquis of Stonehenge, is desirable socially, but not biologically; it bears no fruit. This was one charge at least which could not be levelled at the parish-clerk's son, from whom she had had a son.

At the end of “Barbara of the House of Grebe”, the Dean of Melchester draws attention to a divide between aesthetics and biology, or, more specifically, Willowes' lifeless statute and his earlier, living self, in his condemnation of ‘the folly of indulgence in sensual love for a handsome form only’ (ND 76). However, it is important not to conflate authorial voice with the Dean of Melchester's sermonizing. In an acute, post-structuralist reading of the story, Roger Ebbatson sees Willowes as stepping “out of life into art”;⁴⁷ I suggest that the intensity of Barbara's sexual feeling for the statue does not simply result from her projecting the memory of her lover onto his aesthetic representation, but is predicated on a proximity between the two which is at one with contemporary ideas on the convergence of biology and aesthetics. Willowes is likened to Adonis and Phoebus-Apollo. His statue unites life and art; it is “a specimen of manhood almost perfect in every line and contour” (ND 61; 67). In life, Willowes is “metamorphosed to a specimen of another species” (ND 61). He is at once a figure of classical beauty, resurrected in art when disfigured in life, and a redundant figure in a Darwinian narrative. Rather than see the life-force of the artist as “draining away into the aesthetic object”, which Ebbatson suggests is being hinted at in this story,⁴⁸ I would argue that life, for Hardy (in particular, life in the biological sense) is imbricated with the aesthetic. In The Well-Beloved, as I argue elsewhere,⁴⁹ Jocelyn Pearson's capacity to love and his artistic creativity (he is a sculptor) come and go together: “the artistic sense had left him, and he could no longer attach a definite sentiment to images of beauty recalled from the past”.⁵⁰ In Physiological Aesthetics (1877, dedicated to Herbert Spencer) the biologist-cum-artist Grant Allen, with whom Hardy corresponded,⁵¹ emphasized the biological impulses which lay behind sculpture, concerned, as it was, almost exclusively with the human body and aiming “at absolute beauty of form”; “every limb must be in proportion, every feature in exquisite harmony”.⁵² As Allen put it, “the facts on which Mr Darwin bases his theory of sexual selection thus become of the first importance for the aesthetic philosopher, because they are really the only solid evidence for the existence of a love for beauty in the infra-human world”.⁵³

When Barbara finds the statue which Uplandtowers has mutilated—a moment of Gothic terror—she lets out “a loud prolonged shriek” (ND 71); an anti-orgasm. She is repelled from the defaced figure as she was from the disfigured Willowes. While critics have argued that Barbara's failure is her inability to learn that ugliness can become beauty in sexual love,⁵⁴ I would argue that her repulsion has as much to do with the story's eugenic subtext as with Barbara's moral blindness. Like the beautiful, the ugly has a part in the evolutionary drama. As Grant Allen put it “the ugly for every kind, in its own eyes, must always be (in the main) the deformed, the aberrant, the weakly, the unnatural, the impotent.” He highlighted the eugenic ideology underlying his thesis: “were it ever otherwise—did any race or kind ever habitually prefer the morbid to the sound, that race or kind must be on the highroad to extinction.”⁵⁵ Lord Uplandtowers, exhibiting on occasion “sculptural repose” (ND 46), inadvertently touches on an emergent eugenic aesthetic when, mutilating Willowes' sculpture, he remarks “a statue should represent a man as he appears in life, and that's as he appeared. Ha ha!” (ND 70). The centrality of art, beauty, science and ugliness to “Barbara of the House of Grebe” makes it another, albeit sensational, example of the late nineteenth-century biologization of aesthetics. It should come as no surprise that the periodical Literary Opinion advised the eugenically unfit against reading A Group of Noble Dames, declaring that these are “stories for the reading of healthy and vigorous men and women. For the sickly sentimentalist, or the morbid mental anatomist, this book has not been written.”⁵⁶

Love is repeatedly deromanticized in the stories. For example, the narrator of the fifth tale, “The Lady Icenway”, holding views somewhat modern for a churchwarden, considers sexual attachments to be neither sinful nor virtuous but merely natural: “a tender feeling (as it is called by the romantic) sprang up between the two young people” (ND 112). Likewise, in “Lady Mottisfont”, the ironically named “Sentimental Member” refers unromantically to Philippa, the subject of his love-match, as a “supernumerary” (ND 92), and to marriage as a “sort of experiment” (ND 93). Perhaps the most dramatic instance of the romantic trope's replacement with selection for breeding is found in “Squire Petrick's Lady”. Here, after an initial degree of resistance, Squire Petrick's belief that his wife, Anetta, mated with a man of stock socially superior to his own actually increases his love for her. (He has no truck with the notion that the aristocracy itself was a node of degeneracy.) This pronounced and systematic overhaul of romantic love is unprecedented in fiction: “being a man, whatever his faults, of good old beliefs in the divinity of kings and those about ‘em, the more he overhauled the case in this light, the more strongly did his poor wife's conduct in improving the blood and breed of the Petrick family win his heart” (ND 126).⁵⁷ In fact, he romanticizes her eugenic choice: thinking of his own inefficient ancestors “and the probability that some of their bad qualities would have come out in a merely corporeal child of his loins, to give him sorrow in his old age, turn his black hairs gray, his gray hairs white, cut down every stick of timber, and Heaven knows what all, had he not, or rather his good wife, like a skilful gardener, given attention to the art of grafting, and changed the sort; till at length this right-minded man fell down on his knees every night and morning and thanked God that he was not as other meanly descended fathers in such matters” (ND 127). Darwin had warned in The Descent “it is surprising how soon a want of care, or care wrongly directed, leads to the degeneration of a domestic race”.⁵⁸ His cousin Francis Galton, founder of eugenics, urged that the principles of good breeding, or artificial selection, be religiously applied to the human race. Squire Petrick imagines his wife to be a moral horticulturist, an apostle of eugenic practice.

This association of human breeding with the cultivation of nature finds expression elsewhere in the stories. In “The Lady Icenway” we learn that Anderling had once “taken great interest in tulip-culture, as well as gardening in general”; and that, on returning to England, “he acquired in a few months great skill in horticulture. Waiting till the noble lord, his lady's husband, had room for an under-gardener of a general sort, he offered himself for the place” (ND 118). His work turns out to be general indeed: as Lord Icenway's displeasure at the lack of lineal successor increases, it is to the gardener that Lady Icenway turns; the son she previously had with him is corporeal proof that their sexual union will bear fruit. But, dying from Lady Icenway's social rejection, the gardener responds with a faint wan smile to her blushing request that they reanimate their union: “Ah—why did you not say so sooner? Time was … but that's past!” (ND 120). He is unable to perform the act that would bless Lord Icenway with a son. Anderling, a foreigner (his name signalling “other”, as Brady points out),⁵⁹ has brought new blood to the failing English aristocracy.⁶⁰ That his son should know him only as “the gardener” is, in the Darwinian world which the tales court, not wholly inappropriate. The trade resonates with tropes of creativity.

In the sixth tale, when Petrick learns that his son is in fact biologically his, his wife's confession of extra-marital selection having been based on a “a form of hallucination to which [her] mother and grandmother had been subject” (ND 129), he finds little consolation in biological fatherhood, wishing instead a son can be “one's own and somebody else's likewise” (ND 127). The moment foreshadows Gallia Hamesthwaite's eugenic demand for substitute motherhood in Mènie Muriel Dowie's Gallia (1895);⁶¹ she insists that a child should have both a biological and a social parent: “people will see the folly of curing all sorts of ailments that should not have been created, and then they will start at the right end, they will make better people”; “think of this: a man may love woman and marry her; they may be devoted to each other, and long for a child to bring up and to love, but the woman may be too delicate to run the risk. What are they to do? What would be the reasonable thing to do? Sacrifice the poor woman for the sake of a weakly baby? No, of course no, but get in a mother!” (Gallia 113).

Through their novels a number of fin de siècle writers, such as Sarah Grand, Grant Allen and Emma Frances Brooke, situated themselves in the cross-fire of the cultural debates on heredity. Gallia is the most explicitly eugenic of these 1890s novels. Its eponymous heroine refuses to marry the man for whom she feels romantic or sexual feeling: “when I marry, I shall, of course, marry without love. For that is used up” (Gallia 129). She declares her determination to marry “solely with a view to the child I am going to live for” (Gallia 129). When the Dark Essex tries (and pushes) his luck by kissing her, and addressing her as “my love—love”, we learn “the word, which feeling made sing in the air, had that in it which seemed to cradle Gallia's heart” (Gallia 132). But this fleeting association of the heart with love is soon severed. The heart in Gallia is brought from its metaphysical plane, as archetypal site of romantic feeling, to a level of physical reality and limitation. Hearts are markers of health, and of hereditary taint. The narrative concludes with the revelation that Gallia made the correct eugenic choice in marrying the healthy Mark Gurdon: Dark Essex turns out to have a dodgy ticker. He is but a ‘manifestation of heart-disease’ (albeit an “attractive” one) (Gallia 200). And, in his own words, “a man with pronounced heart-disease ought not to marry. Nothing is more inevitably hereditary” (Gallia 200). The novel ends on a note of eugenic triumph.

Hardy holds his ideological cards much closer to his chest. In “The Marchioness of Stonehenge”, Lady Caroline makes the wrong choice in marrying the parish-clerk's son—“a plain-looking young man of humble birth and no position at all” (ND 77); he remains unnamed throughout the tale. We learn that “when the first wild warmth of her love had gone off, the Lady Caroline sometimes wondered within herself how she, who might have chosen a peer of the realm, baronet, knight; or if serious-minded, a bishop or judge of the more gallant sort who prefer young wives, could have brought herself to do such a thing so rash as to make this marriage” (ND 78-79).

The young and nameless man's bad heart functions as shorthand for his unsuitability as a partner: “he was liable to attacks of heart-disease, one of which, the doctor had informed them, might some day carry him off” (ND 79).⁶² His declaration “Oh, my heart!”, more usually a declaration of love, or love undone, is peculiarly literal, and out of place, in what began as a love story. Luckily for Lady Caroline, if not for the conventions of fiction, it stops, allowing her to make a new, healthier choice—both biologically and socially. The following day, his body having been discovered outside his father's house (Lady Caroline dragged him there by his tied hands), an inquest is held and “syncope from heart-disease was ascertained to be beyond doubt the explanation of his death” (ND 81). But, Hardy's position fluctuates. Elsewhere in the collection, the heart is a metonymic figuring of love: Alwyn in “The Duchess of Hamptonshire” addresses Emmeline as “dear tender heart” (154); Lady Penelope in the preceding tale suffers from heartsickness (143); Lady Mottisfont's heart “dies” with jealousy (142); Anderling's “withers” within him (115); Betty suffers rejection in love “with a swollen heart” (35). And, by the end of the third tale, when Lady Caroline, now the Marchioness of Stonehenge, is denied the filial love of her biological son, she dies of “a broken heart” (ND 90). The romantic narrative reasserts itself; the heart regains its susceptibility to metaphysical disease.

Hardy was not championing eugenics. Nonetheless, close reading of A Group of Noble Dames reveals that he exploited its language in his fiction. He coined the verb “mismate”, which has its first outing in “The Marchioness of Stonehenge”: Lady Caroline (daughter of an earl) apostrophizes her first husband “why not have died in your own cottage if you would die! Then nobody would ever have known of our imprudent union, and no syllable would have been breathed of how I mismated myself for love of you!” (ND 80).⁶³ This neologism is emblematic of a new, biologized, romance that was coming to birth at the Victorian fin de siècle.

Notes

1. Thomas Hardy, “The Marchioness of Stonehenge” (1890), A Group of Noble Dames (1891; Stroud: Alan Sutton Publishing, 1993), 80. This edition includes Hardy's preface of 1896. Subsequent references to this collection of stories (abbreviated as ND) appear in the text.

2. Charles Darwin's cousin Francis Galton coined the term “eugenics” in Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development (London: Macmillan, 1883), at 24-25. “Eugenics” the process of artificial selection for reproduction in humans—was from the Greek eugenes—“good in stock”.

3. See, for example, Gareth Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship between Classes in Victorian Society (1971; Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1992), 128.

4. Havelock Ellis, “Eugenics and St Valentine”, The Nineteenth Century 59 (1906), 785. I am grateful to Robert Mighall for this reference.

5. Daniel Pick, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c1848—c1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 59.

6. Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871; Chichester: Princeton University Press, 1981) II, 403.

7. Darwin took this quotation from Dr David Asher, “Schopenhauer and Darwinism”, Journal of Anthropology (January 1871), 323; absent from the first edition of the Descent, for which it presumably appeared too late to be included, it is cited in the second edition (London: John Murray, 1874), 586 (Ch. xx).

8. For an example of ways in which “New Woman” texts of the 1890s took up and reworked ideas of Darwinian sexual selection and heredity see my forthcoming paper ‘The Morality of Genealogy: Sarah Grand and the Eugenization of Love’.

9. Six of the stories in this collection first appeared in the Christmas issue of the Graphic (1890); they were published in book form in May 1991 by Osgood McIlvaine as A Group of Noble Dames, with the addition of the first and last three tales, “The First Countess of Wessex”, “The Lady Penelope”, “The Duchess of Hamptonshire” and “The Honourable Laura”—see James Gibson, Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life (London: Macmillan, 1996), 113. See also Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1892), 305 for the Graphic's demand for revisions. For the contemporary reception of A Group of Noble Dames see Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971; Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 289. A Group of Noble Dames has largely been neglected by recent criticism: for an interesting exception, see Roger Ebbatson's discussion of “Barbara of the House of Grebe” in Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 1993), 92-106; see further below. The fullest general critical appraisal of Hardy's short stories, including A Group of Noble Dames is Kristin Brady, The Short Stories of Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1982).

10. Gaye Tuchman with Nina E. Fortin, Edging Women Out, Victorian Novelists, Publishers, and Social Change (London: Routledge, 1989), 56.

11. See for example, Thomas Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy (1928-1930; London: Studio Editions, 1994) II, 40 and Gibson, Thomas Hardy: A Literary Life, 34-36, 45.

12. Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), 237.

13. Tuchman, Edging Women Out, 81.

14. Tuchman, Edging Women Out, 83.

15. Lyn Pykett, The ‘Improper’ Feminine: The Women's Sensation Novel and the New Woman Writing (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 36. Cf. Ellen Miller Casey, “Edging Women Out?” Victorian Studies 39 (1996), 151-171; Casey also argues that the situation was more complex.

16. Elaine Showalter, Sexual Anarchy: Gender and Culture at the Fin de Siècle (London: Virago, 1991), 789. For a contemporary discussion of late-Victorian fiction which comes out in favour of romance, see Andrew Lang, “Realism and Romance”, The Contemporary Review 52 (1887), 683-693.

17. Peter D. McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 1880-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).

18. Edmund Gosse, “The Tyranny of the Novel”, National Review (1892) 167-168 and Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters of Sir Edmund Gosse (London: Heinemann, 1931), both cited in McDonald, British Literary Culture and Publishing Practice, 6. William Algernon Locker, assistant editor of the Graphic and son of Arthur Locker, editor of the paper, communicated to Hardy that the stories of A Group of Noble Dames were “very suitable and entirely harmless to the robust minds of the Club smoking-room, but not at all suitable for the more delicate imaginations of young girls” (cited in Martin Seymour-Smith, Hardy (London, Bloomsbury, 1994), 392). Hardy had perhaps gone too far. W.A. Locker did not think that fathers (“accustomed to read or have read to their family-circles the stories in the Graphic”) “would approve for this purpose a series of tales almost every one of which turns upon questions of childbirth, and those relations between the sexes over which conventionality is accustomed (wisely or unwisely) to draw a veil” (W.A. Locker to Hardy, 25 June 1890, Dorset County Museum, cited in Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 305).

19. See, for example, Anthony Giddens, The Transformation of Intimacy: Sexuality, Love & Eroticism in Modern Societies (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 40: “the rise of romantic love more or less coincided with the emergence of the novel: the connection was one of newly discovered narrative form”. More recently Margaret Anne Doody, in a wide-ranging and lucid account of the history of the novel, argues for locating the origins of the novel and romance in classical times: “the development of sentiment and erotic passion in prose narratives dealing with individual characters—this is a much older literary event that most of us are told about in college” (The True Story of the Novel, (London: Harper Collins, 1997), 6). Establishing that romance and imaginative prose share a long history, she collapses the distinction between the romance and the novel on the grounds that the novel is no less likely to employ romance than realism (16). She does not, however, consider the late nineteenth-century gendered debates on realism.

20. See, for example, William J. Hyde, “Hardy's View of Realism: A Key to the Rustic Characters”, Victorian Studies 11 (1958), 45-59. While Hardy did not consider himself a realist, if realism meant “copyism”, the Macmillan reader for Desperate Remedies noted that Hardy demonstrated “somewhat in excess the feelings of a realist” (British Library Macmillan Archives 175 Add. MS 55931). In his literary notebooks Hardy recorded Anthony Trollope's assertion that a good novel should be both realistic and sensational and both in the highest degree which perhaps comes closest to his own view of the ideal novel (Lennart A. Björk, ed. The Literary Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London and Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1985) I, 163).

21. Havelock Ellis, “Concerning Jude the Obscure”, Savoy (October 1896; The Ulysses Bookshop, 1931), 9.

22. Thomas Hardy to Alexander Macmillan (25 July 1868) British Library Macmillan Archives 54923 362F 1.

23. Harold Orel, ed. Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1967), 127.

24. “A Chat with the Author of Tess”, Black and White 4 (August 27 1892), 240.

25. See, for example, Gillian Beer, Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983); Roger Ebbatson, The Evolutionary Self, and Perry Meisel, Thomas Hardy, The Return of the Repressed: A Study of the Major Fiction (New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1972).

26. Hardy, The Life I, 198.

27. Hardy, Literary Notebooks I, 132.

28. For the most recent treatment of Hardy's interest in genealogy see Tess O'Toole, Genealogy and Fiction in Hardy: Family Lineage and Narrative Lines (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997). For an exemplary discussion of heredity in Tess and Jude see William Greenslade, Degeneration, Culture and the Novel 1880-1940 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), Chapter 8.

29. Hardy's personal writings evidence his friendship with the eugenist physician Caleb William Saleeby, with whom he corresponded regularly. He also knew scientists such as the eugenist James Crichton-Brown and the degenerationist Ray Lankester (The Life I, 18, 24-25, 167-7, 269-73). For Hardy's interest in, and creative use of, eugenics, see my article “‘Some Science underlies all Art’: The Dramatization of Sexual Selection and Racial Biology in Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-Beloved”, Journal of Victorian Culture 3.2 (1998).

30. Peter Widdowson, Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology (London: Routledge, 1989), 54-55.

31. For a comprehensive account of the cumulative workings of the stories, which argues that they are ‘ambivalent exempla’, see Brady, chapter 2.

32. Hardy, The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed., James Gibson (1976; London: Macmillan, 1990), 791-2.

33. See George Wing, “A Group of Noble Dames: ‘Statuesque Dynasties of Delightful Wessex’”, The Thomas Hardy Journal 7 (May 1991) 27. As Wing points out (27), “The Honourable Laura” appeared as “Benighted Travels” in the Bolton Weekly Journal ten years before the original six stories appeared in the Graphic; it would seem it was added to the group to make up numbers. For further criticism of the last two tales, see Brady, who argues that they lack the moral coherence and sociological acuity of the rest of the collection (83).

34. A review in Literary Opinion 7 (1891) considered A Group of Noble Dames to be “a perfectly new departure in the fiction of today, being nothing so much as an English nineteenth-century Decameron” (17).

35. Millgate notes that Hardy's main source for the tales was Hutchins' History and Antiquities of the County of Dorset, but that Hardy also stressed their relation to oral tradition: Richard Little Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (London, 1954), 67; Thomas Hardy to Lord Lytton, 15 July 1891, Complete Letters I, 239-40, cited in Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 316-317. Millgate also notes that the publication of A Group of Noble Dames led to a general ostracism of the Hardys, first by the families concerned and then by all levels of local society (317; One Rare Fair Woman: Thomas Hardy's Letters to Florence Henniker 1893-1922, ed. Evelyn Hardy and F.B. Pinion [London: Macmillan, 1972] and S. Heath, ‘How Thomas Hardy Offended the County Families of Dorset’, unpub. TS [Dorset County Museum]).

36. Orel, ed. Thomas Hardy's Personal Writings, 116.

37. See Brady 54. For the 1891 book edition, Hardy altered the order of the tales as they had appeared in the Graphic the year before; while they are in dialogue with each other in the Graphic, their rearrangement for the first edition underscores their intertextuality, and highlights the variety of interpretative strategies which can be brought to bear on any one theme. For example, in the Graphic, the “Marchioness of Stonehenge”, as it was finally called, is followed by “Anna, Lady Baxby”, but in the first edition “Lady Mottisfont”, which was originally the sixth tale, follows “Marchioness of Stonehenge”; both tales are concerned with adoption.

38. As Millgate notes, this was the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club, of which Hardy was a member (Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist, 264). Millgate also records that Hardy had himself delivered a paper before the society: “Some Romano-British Relics Found at Max Gate, Dorchester”.

39. Jude the Obscure (1895; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985) 340-341.

40. Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 284. Cf. “The Continuity of the Germ Plasm as the Foundation of a Theory of Heredity”, Weismann, On Heredity and Kindred Biological Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1889), 165: “how is it that such a single cell can reproduce the tout ensemble of the parent with all the faithfulness of a portrait?”

41. Hardy, A Laodicean (1881; Oxford: OUP, 1991), 187. See my forthcoming article ‘The Desire for “a name, and historic what-do-they-call-it”: Narratives of Romance in Hardy's A Laodicean’.

42. Angus McLaren, “The Pleasures of Procreation: Traditional and Biomedical Theories of conception” in William Hunter and the Eighteenth-Century Medical World, ed. W.F. Bynum, and Roy Porter (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 323-341; Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London: Harvard University Press, 1990). See also Ornella Moscucci's exemplary study The Science of Woman, Gynaecology and Gender in England 1800-1929 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990) for ways in which woman's “otherness” was intensified at this time through medical discourses.

43. In a rejoinder to Hardy's response to an unfavourable review of the collection, in which he had assumed the hostile critic to be “sensitive and beautiful”, a woman, identifying her sex, and herself as “Your Sensitive and Beautiful Reviewer”, declared “if my husband, the Earl, were to act like Lord Uplandtowers, I should not bear him eleven idiot children in eight years, but should appeal to Mr Justice Butt to relieve me from the duty of continuing his noble line” (Pall Mall Gazette July 10, 1891; Orel, ed. Personal Writings 243).

44. Francesco Marroni, “The Negation of Eros in Barbara of the House of Grebe”, The Thomas Hardy Journal 10 (1994), 39.

45. A Group of Noble Dames and Tess were composed in the same year; see Gibson, Thomas Hardy, A Literary Life, 113.

46. Hardy's revisions of 1912 make it explicit that Elfride died “with a miscarriage” (A Pair of Blue Eyes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), appendix, 308).

47. Ebbatson, Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed, 100.

48. Ebbatson, Hardy: The Margin of the Unexpressed, 101.

49. See my article ‘“Some Science underlies all Art”: The Dramatization of Sexual Selection and Racial Biology in Thomas Hardy's A Pair of Blue Eyes and The Well-Beloved’, The Journal of Victorian Culture, 3.2 (1998).

50. The Well-Beloved (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 198.

51. See The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, eds, Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978-) I. 277, II. 58, 68, 74, 106.

52. Grant Allen, Physiological Aesthetics (London: Henry S. King & Co., 1877), 238.

53. Grant Allen, “Aesthetic Evolution in Man”, Mind V (1880), 447.

54. Jean R. Brooks, Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (London: Paul Elek, 1971) 145-6; Roy Morrell, Thomas Hardy: The Will and the Way (Kuala Lumpur: University of Malaya Press, 1965) 114, both cited in Brady 208.

55. Grant Allen, “Aesthetic Evolution in Man”, 448, 449. Sander Gilman's concluding words on the link between sexuality and the beautiful fit perfectly Allen's thesis: “the ugly is anti-erotic rather than merely unaesthetic. It is denied the ability to reproduce” (Gilman, Health and Illness: Images of Difference (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1995), 92).

56. “Hardy's and Black's latest”, review of A Group of Noble Dames, Literary Opinion 7 (July 1891) 18.

57. For the Graphic editor's initial rejection of this tale (along with ‘Lady Mottisfont’), see Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography, 305. Simon Gatrell records Hardy's references to “the tyranny of Mrs Grundy” on the altered manuscript of “Squire Petrick's Lady”; one leaf (fo. 108) and the versos of the next two of the manuscript for the first edition are marked with a variant of “the above lines were deleted against the author's wish, by compulsion of Mrs Grundy, as were all other pasages marked in blue” (Simon Gatreell, Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography: (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988) 84-85; 86). See also Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study, 65.

58. Darwin, The Descent I, 168.

59. Brady 71.

60. The association in “The Lady Icenway” of human reproduction with the cultivation of nature has been overlooked by critics. For example, George Wing dismisses Anderling's enrolment as a gardener as evidence that “he accepts uncaringly the menial job in the nursery hot-houses” (41) while it is clear that the narrator has gone into more than passing detail to establish Anderling's early attraction to, and professional credentials for, gardening.

61. Mènie Muriel Dowie, Gallia (1895; London, J.M. Dent, 1995).

62. First edition (London: James R. Osgood, McIlvaine, and Co., 1891), 112. In the Wessex Edition of 1912, “heart-disease” is replaced by “heart-failure” (ND 79), perhaps to avoid using the term heart-disease twice; it is used as the findings of the inquest (ND 81; first edition, 115).

63. Emphasis added. The OED gives this as the first recorded usage of “mismate”, a rare verb meaning “to mate or match (oneself) unsuitably”; “unsuitable match” (it was previously in existence only as an adjective).

I would like to thank Laura Marcus, Dorothy Porter and Martin Ray for their comments on a previous draft of this paper.