SOURCE: Ebbatson, Roger. “‘The Withered Arm’ and History.” Critical Survey 5, no. 2 (1993): 131-35.

In the following essay, Ebbatson provides some historical background for “The Withered Arm.”

‘The Withered Arm’ has long been acknowledged as one of Hardy's finest short stories. As Kristin Brady points out, its form is close to the folk tale: ‘There is an oral quality to its prose style, but it has no actual narrator with a personal motive for telling his story’.¹ This is so even though the tale also refers to nineteenth-century developments such as photography and galvanism. Brady deals ably with the curious admixture here, noting Hardy's reluctance to comply with Leslie Stephen's request that the phenomenon of the withered arm itself be more fully explained to the reader. The story's supernatural aspects are held firmly in place by the social realism of the presentation, as instanced in the opening description of the...