Paula Byrne: belief

Transcript context

…Simple opening question: What did Virginia Woolf think when she went to visit Thomas Hardy? I loved what she said when she says his face looked like a round apple, because I always think of him with apples, partly because they made cider at home when he was a young boy. I think it’s just such a brilliant description of that little apple, slightly like an old withered apple, but still retaining some juicy flesh. I think she did really like him. I think she liked him more than she expected to like him, which I think often happened with Hardy. People expected him to be really dour and pessimistic because, obviously, of the books. Then, when they met him, they were quite charmed. He had a very soft and gentle voice, and it was quite bewitching. It was quite mesmerizing. I think she was very moved, obviously, because of her father, Leslie Stephen’s, relationship with Hardy. She wasn’t as acerbic as she was with quite a few people. I think she gave him quite an easy time on the whole. This would’ve been in the teens, right, of the 20th century that she saw him? It’s just so —…

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