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Barbara Hardy, Professor Emeritus at Birkbeck College in the University of London, and a Vice-President of the Thomas Hardy Society, celebrated her ninetieth birthday in June of this year. The Hardy Society joins with those many others whose reading has been enriched by her work, to offer her our congratulations and warmest good wishes.
Barbara Hardy's international reputation began with The Novels of George Eliot: a Study in Form, published in 1959; her collection of stories, Dorothea 's Daughter and Other Nineteenth-Century Postscripts, published in 2011, thus marked more than fifty years of critical and creative engagement with not only George Eliot, but the range of nineteenth-century fiction, including full-length studies of Austen, Thackeray, Dickens, Henry James and Hardy. She is the author of some twenty-five books, including studies of Shakespeare and Dylan Thomas, and around 100 articles, chapters and introductions (these last including her New Wessex edition of A Laodicean), a memoir of her girlhood and adolescence in Swansea, a novel, and several volumes of poems. All this has been accomplished while she was running poetry and writing workshops at Birkbeck College, where apart from a short spell at Royal Holloway she has spent most of her academic life, and in addition to her role as teacher and mentor to younger scholars. It is a body of work which might have daunted even those Victorian authors to whom she has devoted much of her critical energy.
The Novels of George Eliot remains one of the most rewarding books yet written on Eliot's fiction. In its emphasis on the relation between form and feeling, it anticipated many of the concerns of Barbara's later critical writing: without using the term, she has been a pioneer of affect theory. Eliot's novels, she argued, come 'as close as the novelist can get to human multiplicity' by giving form to 'fluidity and expansiveness': 'We can trace the form as we can trace a diagram, but the form is always there in the interest of the human picture.' The appropriate form, to borrow the title of her next book (1964), is one that exhibits pattern not for its own sake, but as the product of a particular vision of 'the human lot': in Eliot's case, a humanism which spoke with...