By Joanna Bourke, Professor Emerita of History at Birkbeck and author of Birkbeck: 200 Years of Radical Learning for Working People (OUP, 2023)
Barbara Gwladys Hardy was a distinguished literary scholar, who spent most of her career at Birkbeck. She was famous for being one of the UK’s foremost experts on the nineteenth-century novel, but her work included critical analyses ranging from Shakespeare to modernism. Amongst many others, she wrote on George Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Charles Dickens, W. M. Thackeray, Daniel Deronda, Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, James Joyce, W. B. Yeats, and Ivy Compton-Burnett. She was also an accomplished memoirist, as well as a writer of poetry, fiction, and drama. She was President of the Dickens Society and Vice-President of The Thomas Hardy Society.
Hardy was a glamorous academic. She was socially gregarious, feminist in her outlook, and politically leftwing. As a young person, she had even joined the Communist Party for a short time. Her early life had been difficult. In her autobiography Swansea Girl, Hardy revealled her pride in being Welsh, but also her family’s financial struggles. They were poor: her father was a sailor whom she rarely saw while her mother worked in an insurance office. From a young age, it was clear that Hardy was intelligent. She was sent to the selective (‘posh’) Swansea High School for Girls, where teachers complained that she was mischievous. When Higher Education beckoned, she chose to go to University College, London, where she was awarded a BA in 1947 and an MA two years later. By 1951, she could be found at Birkbeck, employed as an assistant lecturer. She was appointed to a Chair in English literature at Royal Holloway but, after five years, returned to Birkbeck in 1970s as the first Geoffrey Tillotson Professor of English Literature.
Hardy’s texts are ‘personal, impassioned and particularised’, as she admitted in a volume of her collected essays. As she insisted in Tellers and Listeners (1975), she believed that ‘nature, not art, makes us all story-tellers’. When she turned to James Joyce’s The Dubliners, she contended that ‘like all great works of art, [it] is about itself. Its stories are about telling, listening and responding to stories’. She understood narrative in a broad sense, including stories, gossip, dreams, secrets, and lies. Narrative was primarily an ‘act of mind transferred to art from life’, she once explained. Indeed, this was the impulse that led Hardy to turn away from ‘theory’: she belonged to the empirical tradition of English criticism.
Hardy’s reputation can be gauged by numerous prizes and other accolades thrust upon her. In 1962, the British Academy awarded her the Rose Mary Crawshay Prize for her magnum opus, The Novels of George Eliot (1959). This was the book that not only launched her career but also forced literary scholars to take the nineteenth century novel seriously. Then, in 1997, her novel London Lovers won the Society of Author’s Sagittarius Prize and she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. In 2006, she was made a Fellow of the British Academy. She retired in 1989, and was succeeded in her Chair by the equally distinguished literary scholar, Professor Isobel Armstrong.
Hardy loved working at Birkbeck. Her lecturing style was bold and entrancing. She would swish into class wearing long William Morris-type dresses and, for an hour without break, would attempt to convey some of her enthusiasm for literature to her class. She was renowned for never referring to notes during lectures. This was a deliberate decision stemming from a searing experience when, during the very first lecture she ever gave in front of a class, she had the misfortune to be ‘inspected’. The Inspector later commended her teaching but criticised her for looking down at her written text too frequently. From that time, she ensured that she prepared meticulously for her classes, but appeared in lecture-halls paperless.
Students and colleagues enjoyed her company. She was very different from her predecessor as Head of the English Department. This was Geoffrey Tillotson, Head between 1944 and 1969. As a tall, lean, ascetic-looking Yorkshireman, Tillotson was a master of irony, bordering on sarcasm. ‘Do not omit to be literate’, he wrote in his immaculate italic handwriting when a student left out an apostrophe. One of Tillotson’s favourite aphorisms was ‘Criticism, trembling with sympathy, cannot but be ruthless!’. In contrast, Hardy was warm and keen to listen as well as speak. One of her students recalled how, one minute, she was laughing loudly with them in the refectory; the next, indignantly railing against gender inequalities. Despite her literary erudition, she was as comfortable debating about whether The Archers (a radio soap opera) was ‘just melodrama, or something more subtle’ as she was unpicking the narrative structure of the Divine Comedy. Although Hardy loved dinner parties (she was a great cook and entertainer) and enjoyed lively discussions, she often joked that one of the chief advantages of working at Birkbeck included ‘a perpetual and automatic alibi for declining unwanted invitations’ to social events: lecturers simply had to say ‘Sorry, I lecture in the evenings’. This excuse also gave Birkbeck lecturers a ‘plausible excuse’ for watching films in the mid-afternoon or even simply ‘lingering over coffee’. More seriously, in 1964, she told The Lodestone (the Birkbeck students’ journal) that the most significant advantages of working at Birkbeck were intellectual. Because academic staff taught in the evenings, she maintained, there is still a goodish chunk of daylight time for research and writing, and the boon of having students who already know the facts of life. This is probably helpful in subjects like psychology… but in teaching English literature it is splendid never to encounter the kind of student who once asked me (in a full-time college) why Othello and Desdemona couldn’t just have talked the whole thing over.
Of course, Hardy continued, there were some disadvantages as well. Birkbeck students could be ‘maddeningly opinionated’ and there was the perennial problem of booking adequate teaching rooms. But these ‘crumples in the roseleaf’ were ‘mere fleabites’.
Barbara died in 2016, aged 92. She is remembered for her incredible scholarship and literary sensibilities. As she contended in Tellers and Listeners, ‘The good teller and the good listener are loving and truthful, aware of each other, as parents and children, friends and lovers, courteous strangers, novelists and readers’.
