HARDY, Thomas.

£7,500 · Offered by Peter Harrington · No longer available

Desperate Remedies. A Novel. First edition, issued anonymously, partly at Hardy's own expense, in a small edition of 500 copies. Upon reading the author's first novel, the unpublished and now lost The Poor Man and the Lady, George Meredith suggested Hardy tone down the social criticism to write "a novel with a purely artistic purpose" (Millgate, p. 64), resulting in Desperate Remedies.Reviews were mixed, owing to the sensational subject matter. In response, Hardy destroyed the manuscript and it was "never reprinted in its original three-volume form" (Purdy). Nevertheless, Tinsley Brothers went on to serialize and issue in book form Hardy's following two novels, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), providing the obscure author with the confidence and compensation to pursue literature as a full-time career.

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