The Complete Hardy 5: The Hand of Ethelberta

In some of the lists of Hardy's Major Works in the front of the Penguin editions, The Hand of Ethelberta doesn't even get in. Not even Hardy himself seems to have regarded it so, having written it for a periodical as a professional job for money and no more than that.

I'm surprised at that because, like The Well-Beloved, it's a different but not a lesser thing. Both of them might have been as ahead of their time, in terms of 'literary theory', as the likes of Tess and Jude were on the social issues of their day.

The 'hand' of Ethelberta, we could be forgiven for thinking, might be about the standard theme of C19th English fiction - which of the various competitors for the hand of the nubile lady will win it in marriage. But it's not only that, the 'hand' is the much more modern question of authorship, about the relationship between the text and whoever wrote it. And, as such, any number of questions about how those relate to Hardy's own life, fiction and privacy can only multiply exponentially. 

Ethelberta has been widowed very young and her status serves to disguise humble beginnings. Her poems make her a literary celebrity and, like any Hardy heroine, she's not short of suitors. She could be seen as ambitious socially but her large family of siblings are cared for in her employment and she's too demure to be compared to Becky Sharp and in a Hardy-like usage as 'indifferentist' as Neigh is described. 

Our sympathies ought to be with Christopher Julian, an organist with no fortune, while Mssrs. Ladywell and Neigh are only in the field as also-rans but the title and property of Lord Mountclere, old and considered unsuitable by both families, succeed in winning the hand in question. Hardy produces a cliff-hanging story in the race to prevent the wedding in what is otherwise a pedstrian novel and somehow at the end we are happier for the brief coda in which Christopher marries Picotee, the sister, rather than any deep feelings for Ethelberta. She is too much of a blank slate - cool, detached and writerly - for us to care about her in the way we care about the likes of Tess. So if we can't put Ethelberta in with the top echelon of Hardy's work, it's 400 pages with some pertinent ideas in it and ought at least to be listed among the 'major' titles.