Paula Byrne: preference

Transcript context

…As you point out, Hardy never really stopped working until he had to. How good is the unknown Hardy? It seems to me everyone reads the same few novels. What do you recommend from the rest? I really like the minor works. I am going to confess, like everybody else, before I undertook the biography, I read all the big ones. Obviously, the first thing I did was set myself to read everything, and I did it in chronological order because I think that’s really important. I always do that. I did that with Evelyn Waugh, just read everything, because you can really see the growth. I do think some of those minor novels are really, really fascinating and not Hardy-esque. Two on a Tower — it’s just so fascinating. It’s so brilliant, the telegraph and the sense of the new world and innovations. I really like the minor works, I find them interesting, but above all, I really love the poetry. I really, really fell in love with the early poetry written when he was 25 because it’s so modern. It was so shocking. When I read some of those early sonnets, I just thought, “This sounds like somebody is writing it today.” It has the most fresh feel and voice. I would urge anybody who thinks they know Hardy to go back and read those early poems because they’re really quite astonishing. But I do really like the minor works as well. Now, in another book, you argued that Mary Robinson was arguably the most interesting woman of her day in 18th-century England. Why?…

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