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Form and Feeling in Modern Literature: Essays in Honour of Barbara Hardy. Eds. William Baker and Isobel Armstrong. Oxford: Legenda, 2013. 226 pp. £45.00 / $89.50. ISBN 978–1–907975–37–0, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 50, Issue 4, October 2014, Page 506, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqu049
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Extract
This collection of essays is a worthy book to commemorate the scholarship of Barbara Hardy (Emeritus Professor at Birkbeck University of London). Edited by William Baker and Isobel Armstrong, the volume seeks to recognize the many aspects of Professor Hardy's work, both academic and creative. As such, this book contains both critical writings about literature and two pieces of fiction. The essays of literary criticism, in keeping with the focus of Professor Hardy's research, primarily discuss nineteenth-century literature, with Dickens and George Eliot getting the most attention and chapters on writers such as Gerard Manly Hopkins and Wilkie Collins adding to the collection. Most of these chapters either reference the work of Professor Hardy or build upon her research. The essays are divided into sections devoted to the art of narrative, the art of poetry, and women and children in literature. Following the critical essays, which make up the majority of the book, there are two creative pieces of writing, one of which is a short story by Janet El-Rayess and the other an extract from a longer fiction work by Sue Roe. Bookending the critical and creative sections are essays that put Professor Hardy's work in context, provide a biography of her, and an exhaustive bibliography of her professional output. Form and Feeling, then, operates as an excellent tribute to the work of Professor Hardy; however, the critical essays and their approach to fiction in the nineteenth century also make this collection of interest to scholars in the field who may not be as familiar with the work of Hardy.
