SOURCE: Richardson, Angelique. “‘How I Mismated Myself for Love of You!’¹: The Biologization of Romance in Hardy's A Group of Noble Dames.” Thomas Hardy Journal 14, no. 2 (May 1998): 59-76.

In the following essay, Richardson investigates the impact of science—especially ideas of mating and hereditary—on Hardy's A Group of Noble Dames.

The pedigrees of our county families, arranged in diagrams on the pages of country histories, mostly appear at first sight to be as barren of any touch of nature as a table of logarithms. But given a clue—the faintest tradition of what went on behind the scenes, and this dryness as of dust may be transformed into a palpitating drama.

(ND [A Group of Noble Dames] preface xi)

In the late nineteenth century, new biological discourses breathed life into dry parchment and bones, transforming genealogy into a bodied, and palpitating, drama. In Hardy's words “dear, delightful...