Cancelled words

The manuscript of Hardy's first great novel, Far From the Madding Crowd, vanished shortly after its first publication. Rediscovered in 1918 and sold into private hands, it was eventually bequeathed to the Beinecke Rare Books Library at Yale University and studied here in depth, for the first time, by Rosemarie Morgan. This lost manuscript sheds remarkable new light not only on this novel but on the whole of Hardy's work. The manuscript pages, facsimiles of which are reproduced here, reveal Hardy's original composition in the novel and the reluctantly 'cancelled words' which were the result of a long struggle with Sir Leslie Stephen, Hardy's editor. The book was originally commissioned as a rural piece, yet Hardy had other ideas, and author and editor battled over the novel's development. Professor Morgan reveals that Hardy's chief concerns - the development of artistic balance, the role and position of women, his critical view of class distinction - are all articulated much more clearly in the first version than in the printed text. She demonstrates, moreover, that these pages, with words scored through, sentences overwritten and paragraphs revised, show his progressive development as a twentieth-century 'modernist' in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. He was 'father' of the modern novel's valorization of the 'low-life' hero and heroine. Cancelled Words reveals the manner in which Hardy worked: his resistance to censorship, his scrupulous attention to detail and precision, and the often concealed processes underlying his authorship. Ultimately, it serves to shape our understanding of the development of the modern novel.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.