The Complete Hardy 7 : The Novels Ranked

 

Not a Top 6. A Top 6 and then the Next 8. 

Try as I might I can't promote anything from the Next 8 into what looks like an unassailable Big 6 that select themselves.

I would expect a YouGov poll targeted at Hardy admirers to put Tess first, as the best-known and most recognisably and inevitably tragic. What marginally detracts from that, and Jude, for me are the cosmic implications of cruel fate and determinism. Like Shakespeare, even Hardy's least successful work is worth having and it is his fatalism that makes him in the end the great pessimist that he is but The Woodlanders focusses less on an individual than a community in all of Hardy's finely delineated social strata and it is more poignant than extravagantly devastating. 

And if I came to that first, about 50 years ago, I didn't arrive at The Return of the Native until some years later but with its blasted heath, its darkness and the entrancing character of Eustacia Vye, it is compelling.

Casterbidge brings the past, and inescapable character traits, back to destroy Henchard for who we might feel a degree of pity, as of course we do Tess and the ultimately appalling fates of the progressive and well-intentioned Jude and Sue Brideshead.

One thinks of Julie Christie in Far From The Madding Crowd, the dastardly Troy among the customary selection of available suitors, one of which shoots the other so she's left with what had always been the right answer. One could move it up as high as no. 3 but Hardy does abject devastation better than happy endings in the same way that Hamlet and Lear are widely regarded as Shakespeare's best plays.

I would have liked to get The Well-Beloved higher but this is a competitive division. It has ideas in it beyond us being the playthings of a cruel, non-existent god. Ethelbertha was and maybe still is generally regarded as the weakest novel but I like to side with underdogs and find more in it than those here put below.

Greenwood Tree is possibly the equivalent of As You Like It, both likely to be thought more highly of if they hadn't been written by authors who also wrote more substantial things and, as per Ethelbertha, Desperate Remedies deserves more credit than it gets, being the first published effort and coming out of genre fiction. So those that remain only drift like silt to the bottom of the list because this is a red-hot division to compete in and something has to be no. 14 of 14 if one insists on making such a list.

The Trumpet Major is well worth the time it takes to read it. I'd be thrilled to have written anything half as good. I haven't re-read A Laodicean or Under the Greenwood Tree and could still return to adjust their positions once I have but for the time being at least they are ranked as best I can with the caveat that something had to be placed 14th and there's no disgrace in that.

 

1. The Woodlanders

2. The Return of the Native 

3. The Mayor of Casterbridge

4. Tess of the d'Urbervilles

5. Jude the Obscure

6. Far From the Madding Crowd

7. The Well-Beloved

8. Two on a Tower 

9. A Pair of Blue Eyes

10. Under the Greenwood Tree

11. A Laodicean

12. The Hand of Ethelbertha

13. Desperate Remedies

14. The Trumpet Major