An Imaginative Woman

This is a short story written by Thomas Hardy was published in Wessex. This tells of a woman, a wife and a mother who aspires to be a poet and who falls in love with a male poet she never meets. As a Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

A short story by Thomas Hardy, it tells the story of Ella Marchmill who aspires to become a poet.

When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a well-known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking hall-porter

From the beloved British novelist, “a love story that’s simply, grandly, satisfying” (Kirkus Reviews). While traveling home to London, divorcé Sylvester Wykes witnesses a most unusual event: A woman leaps off a locomotive to rescue a sheep in distress. The mystery woman disappears, but Wykes cannot get her out of his head—and is soon caught up in the kind of romance he never thought he’d have again. Ever since losing her husband and child in one catastrophic night, Julia Piper has been consumed by guilt and loneliness. Her neighbors find her a bit odd—and after her daring attempt to save a sheep, she must somewhat agree. But as she strives to piece herself back together while taking on a job tending house for an enigmatic man, she comes to realize that perhaps her chance at finding happiness is not yet out of reach. “Wesley’s dialogue still comes bouncing off the page” in this charming, cynically romantic novel about the emotions, frailties, and desires that drive us, and the search for that one person who can make us whole (Publishers Weekly). “A complex, multilayered, love story . . . vintage Wesley.” —Kirkus Reviews

When William Marchmill had finished his inquiries for lodgings at a well-known watering-place in Upper Wessex, he returned to the hotel to find his wife. She, with the children, had rambled along the shore, and Marchmill followed in the direction indicated by the military-looking hall-porter 'By Jove, how far you've gone! I am quite out of breath, ' Marchmill said, rather impatiently, when he came up with his wife, who was reading as she walked, the three children being considerably further ahead with the nurse. Mrs. Marchmill started out of the reverie into which the book had thrown her. 'Yes, ' she said, 'you've been such a long time. I was tired of staying in that dreary hotel. But I am sorry if you have wanted me, Will?'

A short story written by Thomas Hardy was published in Wessex Tales collection in 1888. Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 - 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

Is there such a thing as a female literary imagination – a special brand of insight and intuition that characterises women’s writing? Is there something about a novel, whether by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë or Doris Lessing, that tells us that it could only have been written by a woman? Do the subject matter, form and style that women choose throw light on the way they think and feel? In this brilliant and highly readable book, originally published in 1976, Patricia Spacks analyses the female view of the world. Juxtaposing – sometimes in startlingly original combination some eighty books written between the seventeenth century and the present day she uses both literary and psychological analysis to explore patterns that recur again and again in the stories women tell – whether about their own lives or the lives of their fictional characters. She dissects female experience in the twentieth century as viewed by an array of writers ranging from Kate Millet to Virginia Woolf; examines the interplay of social passivity and psychic power that dominates characters such as Maggie Tulliver and Jane Eyre, the altruism that impels Jane Austen’s and Mrs Gaskell’s heroines, the ‘acceptance’ of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Ramsey, the personal and social conflicts that beset so many of the adolescent girls that figure in both nineteenth-century and contemporary literature; reveals the complex motives that can be bound up in a women’s deliberate choice of the artist’s role, as appears in the writings of Isadora Duncan’s and Dora Carrington, Marie Bashkirtseff and Mary McCartney – and the surprising forms ‘freedom’ can take, as for Beatrice Webb in the East End of London or Isak Dinerson in the wilds of Africa... The voices echo and re-echo across the years in fascinating counter-point. Their range is enormous – rebels and reformers, actresses and painters, Society ladies and unknown girls in small towns, novels, poems, memoirs, diaries and letters, both English and American, and alongside classics such as Wuthering Heights and well-known modern works such as The Bell Jar, Patricia Spacks introduces an intriguing selection of relatively unknown writers, such as Napoleon’s psychoanalyst great-niece Marie Bonaparte, the Victorian arch-fantasist Mary MacLane and the autobiography of a seventeenth-century Duchess. The Female Imagination is much more than a study of women’s writing. It is an inquiry into the nature of female thought, self-expression and experience. As such it should appeal to every educated woman – and to many men too.