In this week’s TLS – a note from the Editor

The eighth volume of The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy includes
previously unpublished letters from all periods of the author’s life. The
previous seven were edited by Michael Millgate and Richard Purdy and
published between 1978 and 1988. The new volume, edited by Millgate and
Keith Wilson from new discoveries, contains insights into a wide range of
Hardy’s interests, from bicycles to booksellers, songbirds to cider,
feminism to the First World War. “Superbly edited and annotated”, in the
words of our reviewer, Angelique Richardson, it introduces new
correspondents, John Cowper Powys, Sylvia Townsend Warner and Lord
Kitchener, providing “a most absorbing volume for anyone who is interested
in the inner lives and outer worlds of the Victorians and the art of
letter-writing in which they excelled”.

The American poet Anthony Hecht, whose selected letters are reviewed by Adam
Kirsch this week, lived almost as long as Hardy, from 1923 to 2004. Kirsch
sees his defining years as those he spent as a combatant in the Second World
War, fighting in Europe and witnessing the liberation of a concentration
camp. This was experience that separated him from the slightly older
generation of Robert Lowell. Both men suffered from depression but, while
Lowell put the experience at the centre of his work, Hecht “made a conscious
decision to let the rational mind prevail”. The book contains intriguing
letters to the poet Anne Sexton, from the early 1960s, but no letters to his
wives.

When Nelson Mandela dies, we can expect many days of what Tom Lodge calls “the
uplifting narrative” of how the hero and his comrades led a “disciplined
rebellion” that eschewed violence in the spirit of “pragmatism and
idealism”. This “generally received version of the ANC’s history” is one
that is “long overdue for revision” and gets it in a book by Stephen Ellis
who notes, from the ANC’s own records, that its “leaders were by no means
reluctant warriors”. But Ellis “probably overstates the extent of the
Communist Party’s domination”.

Peter Stothard