Talk:Diane and Her Friends

Information about this edition
Edition:	Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 1914
Source:	https://archive.org/details/dianeherfriends00hardiala
Contributor(s):	ragpicker
Level of progress:
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Proofreaders:	ragcleaner

Reviews

• The Nation 12 Nov. 1914:

It is hard to believe that a full generation has passed since, with "But Yet a Woman," Mr. Hardy made himself known to a large audience. That striking novel appeared in 1883. Best-sellers had not yet been so christened, and it may be they did not exist in that golden sense which now attaches to the term. Mr. Hardy's genesis as an author was in a sense old-fashioned. He did not emerge, with a punch, out of the street, or even out of the reporter's room. He had already been for ten years a professor at Dartmouth College when "But Yet a Woman" appeared, and such he remained for another ten, publishing another novel or two, but by no means making up to his public in the business-like way now expected of successful authors. At forty-six he accomplished the rare and difficult feat of ceasing to be a professor; and after a short experience as editor of a popular magazine, again denied his public by becoming a diplomat. The decade of his service produced a single novel, and this is but the second volume of fiction to come from his hand since his retirement in 1905. In forty years he has produced, all told, five or six volumes of fiction. A method so costive, or, to use the current phrase, an "output" so limited, might be the result of either caution or indolence. We do not believe it is the latter in this instance. Mr. Hardy's fiction is not great, but it is distinguished, and distinction is not achieved without pain.

Its style betrays it as the work of that old-fashioned person, a literary artist:

You know how marvellously the dead leaves of the dead year disappear, how little by little the naked branches take on those faint colors which herald the spring, and then, after days of alternate sun and cold, and delays without number, how, in spite of all of these warnings, we are suddenly astonished to find every leaf and bud in its place, and to hear the strife of chattering birds seeking nests.

There is, to be sure, nothing striking in such English as this; one fancies some school of advertising or of journalism setting an exercise: "Take following passage and give real Punch!" Its merit is that which conceals itself; its simplicity has a haunting grace or graciousness. The book is not a novel, but a series of episodes in the lives of a loosely bound group of Frenchmen and Frenchwomen, ranging from the aristocratic Diane and the cynical boulevardier De Sade to Inspector Joly, efficient servant of the Prefecture and man of sentiment. These persons are sketched with a hand light, graceful, but unerring, and their racial atmosphere is conveyed with equal subtlety. That pseudo-Gallic patter which is so deadly familiar in Anglo-American stories of Paris is as far from these pages as from reality.

• The Outlook, 11 Nov. 1914:

Many readers of The Outlook will recall the pleasure with which, years ago, they read Mr. Arthur Sherburne Hardy's story "But Yet a Woman"—one of the novels which it was a pleasure to read on account of the distinction of its style. Mr. Hardy has given us one or two stories since; but the slender volume in which eight short tales are collected, "Diane and Her Friends," will revive the regret which many readers have felt that Mr. Hardy's pen has been so long idle. These tales, which deal for the most part with the aristocratic type of Frenchman and Frenchwoman, have the refinement and dignity which characterized "But Yet a Woman." These qualities are essential in the portraiture of the kind of people who appear in these novels. Good or bad, they are all thoroughbreds under the old French standards. In the interpretation of these people and in the style in which the book is written there is that quality of distinction which one associates with the type. Unfortunately this quality is rare in American writing.

• The Nation, 3 Dec. 1914:

The "Diane and Her Friends" of Mr. Hardy represents a relatively new type of fiction (but then there were "The Pickwick Papers") which seems destined to supplant the old-fashioned serial—the connected series of tales, any one of which may be read by itself.