SOURCE: Meisel, Perry. “The Early Novels.” In Thomas Hardy: The Return of the Repressed, pp. 31-67. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972.

In the following excerpt, Meisel offers a psychological study of three early works, emphasizing the tensions within Hardy which affected their composition.

Hardy's life as an architect's pupil in Dorchester when he was twenty was “a triple existence unusual for a young man—what he used to call, in looking back, a life twisted of three strands—the professional life, the scholar's life, and the rustic life, combined in the twenty-four hours of one day, as it was with him through these years” (Life, p. 32). He describes his peculiar situation at the time as the result of the “accident” that he worked in a country town which was just beginning to feel the effects of modern life (“railways and telegraphs and daily London papers”); “yet not...