Letters and Journals

I read The Well-Beloved by Thomas Hardy. It really is appallingly bad, simply rotten - withered, bony and pretentious. This is very distressing.
I thought it was going to be such a find and hugged it home from the library as this though I were a girl of fifteen. Of course, I wouldn't say about it to another human being except you. The style is so PREPOSTEROUS, too. I've noticed that before in Hardy occasionally - a pretentious, snobbish, schoolmaster vein (Lawrence echoes it), an 'all about Berkeley Squareishness,' too. And then to think, as he does, that it is the study of a temperament! I hope to God he's ashamed of it now at any rate.