Even then, these critics often describe Hardy's best stories as merely fine examples of an older, more discursive tradition of narrative, quite unlike modern short stories, which, in Edgar Allan Poe's formulation, strive for the unity of "a single effect." Other critics--chief among them Kristin Brady, the scholar who has undertaken the most perceptive and thorough study of Hardy's short fiction--object to this assessment of Hardy's stories. While acknowledging that some of the stories are certainly failures that were hastily or even mechanically written, Brady persuasively argues that most of them reveal a fascinating double dimension in Hardy's narrative voice by developing a traditional, oral method of storytelling in conjunction with techniques and themes that are recognizably modern, literary, and subversive of conventions and the expectations of readers.
Hardy's own assessment of his short stories is difficult to gauge because of the bitterness with which he turned his back on all his fiction after the hostile reception of Jude the Obscure (1895). Even though he described the stories in his final collection, A Changed Man (1913), as "mostly bad," adding, "I heartily wish I could snuff out several of them," he took great care arranging and revising the stories in his first three collections: Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), and Life's Little Ironies (1894).
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