[Hardy-l] Findon Sheep Fair

[Keith Wilson]

I assume you didn't mean, Rosemarie, that Hardy really did father a child by Tryphena  -- which is what your phrasing implies.  Millgate's position on the subject is unequivocal: "There was certainly no child, probably no engagement, and perhaps not even a dramatic parting but simply a gradual relapse into the amicable cousinly terms of the past" Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited, 99.  This "son Randy" canard, floated (if that's what one does with a canard) more than 40 years ago by Lois Deacon and Terry Coleman in the notorious Providence and Mr Hardy, was rapidly shot down: see F. B. Pinion, A Hardy Companion (1968), 435-40; Robert Gittings, "Thomas Hardy and Tryphena Sparks," TLS, 27 April 1973, 477-78; Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (1975), 223-29; and Millgate's original articulation of his no illegitimate child position in the first version of his biography, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (1982), 106. 
 


________________________________

From: Rosemarie Morgan [mailto:Rosemarie.morgan at yale.edu]
Sent: Mon 01/09/2008 3:50 PM
To: hardy-l at coyote.csusm.edu
Subject: Re: [Hardy-l] Findon Sheep Fair



Thank you for this, Patrick -- and also for the details of Hardy's love
affair with Eliza Nicholls. It's the most substantial account I've ever
read. If he *did* father her child (as well as Tryphena's) it's no wonder
he felt so bitter about remaining childless in marriage. 

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