Works of Thomas Hardy discussion

This appeared in my feed today. 150 years... Wow.


https://www.irishtimes.com/opinion/an...

I just posted my review. I used a library copy, so I won't be able to post here chapter-by-chapter as time goes by.
A few impressions:
I was surprised to learn that Hardy wasn't particularly proud of being a novelist. To him, poetry occupied the "supreme place in literature". But his novels paid the bills. He felt more relief than joy when he finished them - he was usually working with a time crunch due to magazine serialization contracts. His great fear had been that popular taste (and thus publishers' tastes) might divert him into "society" novels out of economic necessity. Thank God for us that didn't happen. His stories were of common country folk, to whom very uncommon things happen.
Speaking of uncommon things happening, my own love of Hardy has a lot to do with the way he used Fate in his books. He said "... human nature must never be made abnormal, which is introducing incredibility. The uncommonness must be in the events, not in the characters, and the writer's art lies in shaping that uncommonness while disguising its unlikelihood...". As I've said in this group before, I don't think he was always able to make his twists of fate believable - but I love them anyway!
He believed in an "Amoral Creator in whom there rest(s) neither good nor evil". (Disclaimer - I am a Christian). In his responses to charges of atheism and heresy, etc., to me his tone always seemed to be one of attempting to trim down the vast chasm separating his beliefs and Christianity. I imagine these attacks were troubling to a man whose extended family had been so formally invested in the church, as evidenced by his lifelong habit of returning for church services, as if he were glancing sideways at God.
I was moved by the tribute he received on his 81st birthday from over one hundred younger writers: "In your novels and poems you have given us a tragic vision of life which is informed by your knowledge of character, and relieved by the charity of your humor and sweetened by your sympathy with human suffering and endurance. We have learned from you that the proud heart can subdue the hardest fate, even in submitting to it... In all that you have written you have shown the spirit of man, nourished by tradition and sustained by pride, persisting through defeat."