The Withered Arm | Thomas Hardy | A Bitesized Audiobook

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Rural superstitions, jealousy and betrayal, with a hint of witchcraft, combine in this tragic tale of a young wife and her husband’s abandoned lover. An atypical incursion into the realms of gothic horror and the supernatural by one of the great late Victorian novelists.

Narrated/performed by Simon Stanhope, aka Bitesized Audio. If you enjoy this content and would like to help me keep creating, there are a few ways you can support me:

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00:00:00 Introduction
00:01:18 Map of Hardy’s Wessex
Chapters:
00:01:34 I. A Lorn Milkmaid
00:07:08 II. The Young Wife
00:16:38 III. A Vision
00:26:57 IV. A Suggestion
00:36:29 V. Conjuror Trendle
00:43:19 VI. A Second Attempt
00:50:16 VII. A Ride
01:02:16 VIII. A Waterside Hermit
01:09:35 IX. A Rencounter
01:17:42 Credits, thanks and further listening

Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) ranks as one of the greatest Victorian novelists, although he regarded himself primarily as a poet – and in the last thirty years of his life devoted himself almost exclusively to writing poetry after his last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’ was published in 1895.

He was born in Upper Bockhampton, Dorset, in 1840, the son of a stonemason and builder, also called Thomas. His mother Jemima educated young Thomas at home for some years, before he attended school in Bockhampton and Dorchester, where he thrived academically. He was apprenticed to a local architect at the age of 16, which led eventually to his studying at King’s College London in his early 20s. However, he was never comfortable living in London and felt his social inferiority and rural origins keenly; as a result he became interested in social reform. In later life he expressed his “harmony of view” with the great liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, whose work ‘On Liberty’ Hardy discovered at around this time.

His career as a writer began in the late 1860s, although his first novel, ‘The Poor Man and the Lady’ (1867) failed to find a publisher as it was regarded as too “socialistic” and revolutionary. Hardy later destroyed the manuscript. His first two published novels ‘Desperate Remedies’ (1871) and ‘Under the Greenwood Tree’ originally appeared anonymously. It was his next two novels, ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’ (1873) and ‘Far from the Madding Crowd’ (1874) which really began to make his name. ‘A Pair of Blue Eyes’, based on Hardy’s courtship of Emma Gifford, who became his first wife, is credited with inventing the term “cliffhanger”, as one chapter ends with one of the main characters literally hanging off a cliff… and readers of the serialised version in Tinsley’s Magazine had to wait a month until the next issue to find out what happened next.

All of Hardy’s novels are set in a fictionalised version of his native Dorset: a map of the area, based on Hardy’s own sketches, can be seen in this video at 00:01:18

Later novels include some of his best known works, ‘The Return of the Native’ (1878, set in the same part of Wessex as ‘The Withered Arm’), ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ (1886), ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’ (1891) and ‘Jude the Obscure’ (1895). The last two in particular were highly controversial in their day, for their challenge to Victorian sexual morality. After Jude, Hardy turned almost exclusively to writing poetry – although he had composed poetry throughout his writing career, he only published his first volume in 1898. He was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910, and twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature (1910 and 1921).

Thomas Hardy married Emma Gifford (of ‘Blue Eyes’ fame) in 1874. They had no children and became gradually estranged, eventually living apart from the late 1890s, until her death in 1912. In 1914 he married Florence Dugdale, who had been his assistant since 1908. She survived him upon his death aged 87 in 1928.

‘The Withered Arm’ first appeared in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in January 1888, and was subsequently published in book form as part of the collection ‘Wessex Tales’ later the same year.

The art on the title card is a detail from ‘Woman on a path by a cottage’, by John Atkinson Grimshaw (1836–1893). (Public domain; source Wikiart.org)