Hello, you're listening to the LRB podcast. I'm Mary Wellesley and welcome to this close readings fusion episode. I'm delighted to be joined today by Mark Ford

to talk about something I've been really interested in for a while, namely the medieval as it

appears in Thomas Hardy and in the wider Victorian imagination. Mark has written an excellent book

about Hardy called Thomas Hardy Half a Londoner and has another book coming out on Hardy soon.

Is that right, Mark?

That's correct.

It's called Woman Much Missed, Thomas Hardy, Emma Hardy and poetry.

Well, thank you so much for agreeing to answer all my hardy questions, ill-informed as they will be.

Absolute pleasure, Mary.

Delighted to be here.

Listeners are probably aware that Mark is normally heard in conversation with Seamus Perry.

They're currently doing a series together called The Long and Short, about 19th and 20th century short stories and long poems, which is part of the LRB's Close Reading's podcast

subscription. And I'm doing a series at the moment with Irina Dumitrescu called Medieval Beginnings,

which is also part of the Close Reading subscription. More details at the end of this episode.

And I wanted to bring these two worlds together because I had a baby

relatively recently and through the long feeds, which take up rather a lot of time, I was

listening to the audiobook of Far From the Madding Crowd. And I hadn't read it for, I think,

18 years. And I just loved it so much coming back to it. And it struck me how much Hardy is a kind

of arch-nostalgist and how much he's in love with the world of the past. And I love the way he

depicts these lost worlds with such delight. And it felt to me like that was a lot

of what I love about medieval literature. It's these lost worlds which you can half access but also

can't really and these texts become the kind of windows into them. I suppose for Hardy it's interesting because in being, as you say, in love with the lost world,

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