Jane Austen and Thomas Hardy discuss.

What follows is an imagined conversation between two great names of English Lit. – Austen and Hardy, and although they could hardly have met in their lifetimes, that doesn’t mean they didn’t do in my imagination.

Here they talk to each other about the use of the imagination in works of fiction. I wrote it to try to shed some light on the subject, and although I freely admit that it is my own opinion masquerading as theirs, it is as close as I can get to what I think they would have said, had they met. RLF

#1: The use of the imagination in writing

Thomas Hardy: Some folk say that tis easier to write about that which you have had personal experience, others that to write about what you ostensibly know nothing is better. What may your opinion on such matters be, Miss Austen?

Jane Austen: If one is to paint accurately, setting forth all the nuances of a life in particular, I should say that knowing your subject is essential to the successful completion of the exercise.

If, on the other hand, you are to write in such a manner as a landscape painter, using the broadest of brush strokes to sweep the reader along and across, I would say that writing about what you may know only little suffices. What say you, Sir?

TH: I think my opinion would accord with yours, specifically, I would add, that were a writer of fiction to know those about whom he pens too well, should I say in divers ways, that so much might be left out as taken for granted, or too much be included as taken as necessary to paint the canvas with enough detail to be clearly discerned.

JA: But you mistake yourself, Sir, if you imagine that your painting and yours alone is the only provender of clues to a heroin’s character.

TH: How so?

JA: It would be to deny the perspicacious reader the pleasure of discovery whilst reading. I have oft been informed, for example, that readers generally discern that Mr. Elton had fallen for Emma Woodhouse long before he makes his love plain to her whilst riding home from an engagement.

Whereas, when writing it, I had hoped to offer it as a revelation to the reader. Not so, would that it had been, but I had made too much clear in earlier chapters.

TH: So you hold to the stance that the reader fleshes out what the writer omits, do you?

JA: I do Sir, but that does not really bring us much closer to an answer to your initial question, albeit throwing some light on aspects of the crafting of a novel.

TH: I may say of myself, that although I have known womankind in some intimate details, having been twice married to the gender substantive – mature female, that nevertheless, e’en such an one as I can only hope to discover the full warp and weft of a woman’s mind.

Now, mark me! I had painted many such headstrong women in my novels, not least the Misses Everdene, Vye and Bridehead, as strong willed a charm of finches, or bevy of ladies, if tis more to your liking, as you are likely to find the length and breadth of the country hereabouts.

Yet, in moulding such clay as I found in my experience of womenfolk, I only had met with the characters of my own dear mother, my wife Emma Gifford, my later wife, Florence Dugdale, and my own Tryphena Sparks to help me fashion the Bathshebas, Eustacias and Sue Brideheads of this world. I had no other save those to help me.

What of yourself; your craft enabled you to seek out motive, device, and design from those in your own acquaintance, as well, if I may say, from your own self-knowledge of what it is to be a women. I, of course was at a disadvantage in that respect, being but a male of the species.

JA: That was well said, Sir. I do indeed have that disposition to the world that is full of innovation and insight, called the more often women’s intuition, and of course, I was surrounded in my company by personages from all the higher walks of life, whether they were men or women.

I am of the opinion, though I freely admit there may be those readers who disagree, that I painted male as cleverly and closely as female.

Mr. Knightly, come to be Emma Woodhouse’s preferred choice in matrimony, I made of stuff that could withstand any assault on his temper, bearing such shocks with the equanimity proper to a gentleman of his standing and reputation.

How would you say I came to be able to accomplish that, being but a woman, and a much younger one at that when first I told the tale?

TH: First let me say that I do hold with what you said earlier about the insightful nature of the reader; that what is omitted by virtue of considerations of space and interest by the writer, must be added by the reader – to herself, quietly whilst reading a page.

We paint but outlines, if we are honest about our trade, as you hinted at before. In making Gabriel Oak suffer misfortune as only a sure and confident man could or would, I set out the bones of the man for the reader to add flesh to, as it were. Oak had the resilience required to bide his time until Bathsheba was ready to take his hand in marriage. Such stout characters as Oak are not to be refused too often for the man I gave a bearing of nobility, even as he handled a shepherd’s crook in a marketplace hoping to be hired by richer men than he.

Your Mr. Knightly, had similar features, I think. You sewed the seeds of such resilience and inner fortitude in the readers’ fertile imagination and they did the rest.

JA: I am sure that you are entirely right, Sir. What I will admit to is knowing little of the external settings of my works, placing such intrigues and dilemmas as I could weave to take place in drawing rooms of the great houses of our lands, whereas you painted your canvas much wider than I, did you not? You must have had a wider knowledge of your portion of England than I.

TH: I did paint such a wide canvas. My purpose was o’erta’en by my love of my neighbourhood and beyond. I loved the wild places as well as I did the domestic. An absence in London fuelled my love of the rural parts of England from whence I come.

Furthermore, I deemed the natural surroundings of my protagonists as having greater influences on them than any of us mortal beings can know. The Vale of the Great Dairies, as I named that part of Wessex in which many of my dramas take place, is an area peopled by great farmers, landlords and their tenants.

In addition, on the peripheries of such green and fertile river meadows and flood plains, there are those places perfectly in accord with certain darker aspects of our nature. Such an one is Egdon Heath, though you will not find that name on any map, it being an amalgam of my own devising. The writer, while able to focus on a region, is able too to sharpen that focus, or to distort it for his own purposes.

Tess’ wanderings abroad in Wessex may not in reality have taken her the same amount of daylight to undertake. Readers do not have their noses in my books to glean knowledge about the geography of south west England, and take it as read that the distance marked out by the writer has the expected resulting exhaustion of the traveler on the pages.

But I am right in saying that your novels – the stories within them, were only hardly influenced by surrounding countryside, am I not?

JA: You are indeed Sir, although there is an implied community without the drawing rooms of the houses which are witness to the dramas that enfold within.

Neighbours are not wealthy only from the pedigree of their birthright in my novels, but in part by their position as landlords, gentlemen farmers or the occupants of those peripheral businesses that serve the latter – the clergy, and such as treat our hearts and minds as well as our stomachs and our physical and our mental well-being.

And while it is true that the rolling hills and dales of the land play but little part in my dramas, that they are of necessity mentioned in passing is vital in placing everything in the context of provincial England – no more or less than that.

I have not had, as you have, Sir, to acquaint myself with the ways of the shepherd and his flock as you have, and nor do I concern myself with such malignant influences as you appear to draw upon in the course of your work.

TH: It is true that I have used satire of circumstance – even of coincidence, to affect all who live and breathe under the arching sky or the arc of Heaven, if you prefer.

My motives run too deep for me to discuss in anything but at length; suffice it to say that I brought into the lives of those on whom my stories centre, the workings of ethereal beings from pagan worlds, both known and unknown to my readers. Enough if I can show that to which we look for succour is sometimes wont to fail us.

You, Miss Austen, clearly show, do you not, that mischief works amain in the heads and hearts of mortal men and women; that misunderstanding stems from the arrogance of an inclination to think too well of one’s own opinions, together with an imperious disdain of lesser folks.

JA: True. I give my heroin all the failings that man is heir to, in some abundance in many, sparingly in some, with innate wisdom residing cheek by jowl with modesty in others. That is how I see folly; in pride going always before a fall, whereas in your works, even goodness personified is thwarted by a malevolence not of woman born.

How come you to understand those workings of which we can have but little understanding, Sir?

TH: My disposition to life fuels my working with tools that are fashioned, not by those they affect – jealousy, greed, vaunting ambition, utter simplicity, but are rather given to them in the grander scheme of things, of hereditary myths and values, and those beliefs that run amuck in rural areas suffused by so much superstition, as well as by forces of Nature that wreck a man’s hopes just as easily as they ruin his harvest in the fields of his farm.

How much the imagination can provide

JA: Writers of fiction, of whatever genre, be it a comedy or a tragedy or some shade or mix in between, must, perforce, use their imagination to supply that which is unreal, which never actually took place, at least not in the order set out by the author, must they not?

TH: I am in whole accord with what you say, yes!

JA: Then my question is; How much, to what extent, in what detail, does imagination play a part in any written work of fiction?

TH: In my own writings, it is my imagination, fuelled in part by my memory that informs me as to detail as well as to generalities. I should add a most important proposition; that both reader and writer cooperate in creating meaning.

JA: I have said as much earlier, have I not?

TH: Indeed! Pray, let me continue. In my own verse, more dear to me than all my novels, I have written about birds stiffening without the warm parlour of some house on a freezing night – this much I have direct experience of seeing with my own eyes.

JA: But this is but the simplest of examples.

TH: Let me add that it is, I grant you, the simplest, but in using a symbol of some other state as the dead robin lying frozen in the snow, whilst within there is much cheer and merriment, I am using something so commonplace as to be unmistakable to the reader. That vision of the dead bird is shared by us – reader and writer, and as I have said, its meaning is a cooperative and, dare I say it, a collaborative creation.

Now, my adding to that creation, something of my own creating – a symbol for society from which one has been ostracized, I alone am creating first! It is the requirement of the successful writer to be able to conjure up imagery and attach it to whatever it pleases him to attach it to, with the essential proviso that in doing so, the writer does not stretch his own credibility in the mind of the reader.

JA: So that, for instance, were you to attach to it a symbol of contentment, readers would protest by stopping reading. They would be right in so doing as the imagery used does not go with any symbolism intended. The reader will then draw her own conclusions regarding its symbolic nature and what it symbolizes.

TH: Exactly. I may not stretch credibility, although I may draw the reader further into the mind of someone appearing on the pages, at which time, that person’s apparent mistaken symbolic attachment to something provides clues to the person’s state of mind.

JA: I take your meaning, Sir. My good Miss Harriet Smith takes a sign of attachment to Mr. Elton, from such things as bitten ends of pencils and such trivia to show her love for him, whilst Emma takes it for no such thing, although she deceives Miss Smith in approving of such an attachment. It is indicative of the extent Emma has duped her into thinking Elton to be an admirable and willing suitor. So, the reader chooses Emma's choice of symbolic meaning rather than Harriet's.

TH: For my own part, I take my poem about Drummer Hodge’s corpse lying on the crest of a hill in South Africa as indicative of the tragedy of dying fighting for something which is not one’s own.

I speak of Lyonesse, an hundred miles away, and my galloping their post haste in the ardour of my love. I use phrases: ‘the rime was on the spray’, which heartened me on my way. Such imagery was mine to conjure; I could just as easily have used another image to accord with my state of mind. My choice is mine to make, but in making it – in choosing this particular one rather than another, I must strike a chord in the hearts and minds of my readers. Art does not merely hold a mirror up to nature, but rather holds a portion of a mirror up to a portion of nature, and both mirror and portion are mine to choose.

JA: I think you are right. Were it not so, the choice of which image to support a particular circumstance would risk the danger of being inappropriate.

TH: Quite. In ‘Under the Waterfall’, I used the similarity of one thing to another: And the leafy pattern of china-ware, The hanging plants that were bathing there. That foliage and that china-ware I alone saw, in my mind’s eye, or else from my memory of the event, and connected the two to make the reader see more clearly what I saw, or remembered seeing.

JA: And you describe only so much and no more – you, it is, who holds the mirror up to nature, focusing on some significant item. So we may use our imagination to conjure and to re-create.

TH: Yes, we may – rather it is imperative – we must, for how is the reader to be transported to that selfsame spot, to share those same thoughts with me?

JA: We can say then, can we not, that a well chosen portion of all there is to see, intensifies the reader’s imagined experience?

TH: Yes, and completes the picture. My only reservation is that this must not be overdone. Just so much and no more. Like the painter, in reddening the cheeks of the hireling shepherd in Holman Hunt’s creation of the same name, we must not use too much of the colour red on our brush, else we make him look clownish than rustic.

So it is with what we draw with our words; not enough and we run the risk of removing the enjoyment of reading, too much and we do the same, do we not?

JA: We do, but I think we run the risk too of rendering what we have written too repetitive, or, which is worse, in my mind, too formulaic.


The nature of writing and using the imagination

JA: I have noticed that I cannot verbalise what I write down with my pen. That my ideas and concepts run on while I am writing, but when I put my pen down, they stop. It is as though writing triggers thought, isn’t it, Sir?

TH: Indeed it is. I have oft noticed that when writing – that the ideas coming into my head are invited by the words on the page in front of me. One idea written down brings another idea close on the former one’s heels, if you see what I mean.

JA: Does that mean that though you construct a plot, fleshing out the chapters is done whilst writing?

TH: I do. Although I know where my story is going, even as I know the fate of my characters, the specific journey to that last line is completed whilst writing. Every turn, halt, onward step comes to me whilst writing.

I too have noticed that spending some time away from my desk and my pen, and taking a walk around the parish, brings new ideas and directions to mind.

I walk along the ridges of my part of Dorset, along to the Hardy Monument, from where I can see the sea seethe and boil under a fresh breeze. I take myself down to the swannery hard by and look out to sea.

It was at just such a time, whilst walking up to the ridge from Upwey, and first glimpsing the clear and level horizon of the ocean that I got the idea that Eustacia Vye always longed to see the blue waters beyond Osmington.

I had written that as her aging father had, in former times, been a sea captain – Cap’n Vye, as his neighbours were wont to address him or refer to him in his absence, his daughter, Eustacia, longed for adventure sailing off on the tide.

Here we may see how imagination is formed. No doubt Cap’n Vye sat his daughter on his knee when she was a child and told her sailors’ stories. To an impressionable young mind these stories would have formed mental images, that, although she had never seen, she nevertheless had sufficient imagination to clothe the bare bones of the imagery suggested by her father’s yarns, e’en as some would have been ripping yarns – apocryphal stories that had coalesced into his own mind and which had never occurred in the manner he described to his daughter eagerly doting upon his every word.

JA: So, you maintain that the imagination stems from our memory, I should say, our sub-conscious memory?

TH: In part, certainly and there much resides untouched and unremembered. It needs the power of significance to bring it to mind. That significance is the more easily formed and used when writing commences.

JA: You seem to be suggesting, Sir, that only the act of writing spurs us to delve into our memory and find there the accounts of the memorable and forgettable. Are there not other ways to attach significance to events or things both animate and non-animate?

TH: As I have said, strolling upon the ridge, Black’un, as I have oft referred to it, overlooking Weymouth – the Budmouth in my novels, to West the town of Bridport or Port Bredy if you prefer, I take in as much as I can.

The smells and odours along the way bring, via my nostrils, associations I had ceased to remember. The daffodil at my feet reminds me of my courtship of my wife, Emma, and from that it runs fleet of foot, to the end of our time together, which saddens me, and forces me to lift my gaze from that vivid spring tapestry of colour at my feet.

I look up and now in front of me, and seeing the cold, black tower commemorating Admiral Hardy, not myself, I must hasten to add, turns my thoughts to secret trysts, and from that I fashioned meetings between Eustacia and Damon Wildeve, aloft by Blackbarrow and the pond hard by.

Not having envisaged this assignation, my wanderings on the uplands, I was prompted to write it as soon as I got back to my desk and my pen, now dried and in need of dipping into the inkwell with a plop.

Even that plop of my pen and the little circles ever decreasing from their epicenter – the tip of my pen, gave me the means of Damon announcing his arrival at dusk, the failing light making it the easier to conceal emotion painted on Eustacia’s face. Wildeve was to throw a stone into the pond, and a boy sitting watching for such ripples, ostensibly from the flouncing of a frog into the brackish water, marked it as his time to depart his mistress, though in fact it actually signalled Wildeve’s arrival.

Although I had planned whilst sketching the outline of my story, that Eustacia and Damon would be romantically inclined to each other, I had given little thought to their difficulties in keeping such meetings to themselves alone.

As simple and regular a thing as dipping a pen into a bottle of ink brought to mind the episode I have just described. What say you, madam?

JA: Why, only that I can concur; that whilst taking my evening walks, I had occasion to notice a gypsy encampment recently settled in the fields that edge the lane down which I am wont to walk, and it was the sight of the little ones running towards me, to beg or to talk, I know not what as I fled the scene in terror, that informed me and prompted to write a similar episode in the lives of the Misses Woodhouse and Smith.

TH: But that is quite a different stimulus to the ones I had described – it is autobiographical in nature, is it not, whereas I write vicariously, leading my characters on according to the dictates of their own desires and motivations, and those springing from events and items that symbolize and represent rather than actually occurring in a coherent manner.

That I wanted the two lovers to meet was already in mind, it was the manner and the place that informed me, not my own actions, though they too inform me. Who can do aught else who lives and dies beneath the canopy of night and the light of day?


It is the mind that brings together what would normally be thought entirely disparate notions, and this is done best and fullest when we are able to concentrate most, this occurring in our slumbers – in our night-dreams, more than in our day-dreams; both have little direction that we are consciously aware of, the former being outside our control, the latter to be arrested when our attention is demanded, and which snaps us out of our day-dreaming.

What part do our culture and our own experiences play in the forming of our imagination?


JA: Do you think our culture has an effect on our imagination?

TH: In order to answer that question we should first define what we mean by the word culture, should we not?

Some have said that the word culture generally refers to “patterns of human activity and the symbolic structures that give such activity significance”. Others that the word refers to “a set of learned beliefs, values and behaviors the way of life shared by the members of a society”.

JA: And the associations formed in our comings and goings are vital components of culture, are they not, Sir?

TH: To be sure. Solitary confinement is punishment in every culture the world over. We are a gregarious species and seek out our fellow human beings – for a variety of reasons.

Culture can be understood as symbols and meaning that are invariably contested, I think.

TH: Yes, and I will add that it is in the contesting that cultures evolve and grow, so much so that one generation or two removed from this one will have difficulties understanding the present one. Man is continually searching for meaning, whether he is aware of it or not.

JA: So, to return to my initial question: what effect does culture have on our imagination?

TH: I would say it frames our imagination, although I do not mean that in any physical sense. You and I can both imagine what the surface of the Moon is like, even though it is beyond our physical ability to do much more than see it at night, and that at many hundreds of thousands of miles.

JA: We could do that, I agree, but who is to say that what we imagine the surface of the Moon is like accords with what it actually is like?

TH: I agree, it is impossible, but if we come a little closer, I can shut my eyes and see Higher Bockhampton, the place of my birth, and the surrounding countryside, I know it so well.

JA: But can you describe it in detail so that the reader can do the same?

TH: No, all I can hope to do is influence his imagination – his propensity to form images from what he reads.

JA: Then what of culture? Can you write about a person in such a way that the reader can identify that character as a believable member of his own society?

TH: I think I can, yes. You see, we all carry the unseen baggage of culture around with us. It informs us constantly, though at a subliminal level.

I write about a man shrugging his shoulders in answer to a question that has been put to him, and you, the reader, will more or less automatically attribute a meaning to the shrugging of his shoulders. You will say something like, “He doesn’t know the answer, or he doesn’t care what the answer is.”

JA: But that example is a very simple one, is it not? We as writers must place our characters and everything they do and say in the context of the culture we are ourselves members of.

TH: Yes, that is right, but what if we write about a tribe of people who dwell in the rain forests of Borneo, how can we meet the demands of describing characters in such a culture, given that we most probably know little or nothing of it?

JA: Then we can only hope to approximate, as writers do. Invariably though, writers of fantasy fiction give alien characters traits that are so obviously opposite to our own culture that it is still clear that the writer is influenced by his own culture. He writes about opposites, or characteristics that can be identified by his readers as clearly being different, culturally.

TH: What of you, writing about dramas in drawing rooms? Does not culture impinge upon you too much?

JA: In a way it does, but I turn it to my advantage, letting the cultural implications of one person’s actions occasionally vary from what would be expected to show readers that his exceptional behaviour shows him to be flawed.

TH: That is curious. William Shakespeare wrote about the failings of men and women located in particular cultures, though he fashioned his dramas, many of them, around traits we could all identify from this one; vaunting ambition (Coriolanus and Macbeth), jealousy (Othello) and indecision (Hamlet), yet still placing those characters a million miles away from our own culture in terms of everything else except behaviour.

JA: I think that is his genius, that he could make his audiences identify with the characters therein, precisely because he was illustrating attributes that were clearly close to that of his audiences.

TH: And even though his plays were in settings incredibly removed from those inhabited by members of the audience. His Roman plays were acted out within sight of the Tiber, the Scottish play was removed historically from the present, albeit being set in a place that could be identified by most of the audience.

JA: So what you are saying is that what ostensibly looks like something from another culture, its inner workings are from the writer’s own.

TH: How could it be otherwise. Stories, poems, novels are all written by people from one culture or another – they may wish to play down certain aspects of that culture, or highlight them if you wish, but I say that the influence of culture upon imagination is a great one, albeit one we do not fully understand or sometimes are even aware of.

Your dramas take peculiar turns and have surprising outcomes, and yet a close reading renders such peculiarities unpeculiar and such surprises hardly surprising, precisely because you are writing about events that could happen in your own culture.

JA: Thank you for that compliment, Sir.

TH: It is well deserved, so much so that talking about it has led me to think that we writers are in fact upholders of culture as it strikes the individual’s heart and mind.

That we are able to do that, ostensibly from our imaginative powers is possible because we ourselves are products of the culture in which we live and die.

The role of language in the imagination

JA: What part would you say language plays in the imagination? Do we need words to think?

TH: Before we can attempt to answer that question, I think we must know more clearly what we mean by the word, ‘imagination’.

JA: Was it not Aristotle who first introduced it to the world of the philosopher, and called it phantasia?

TH: It was, and he defined it as something akin to the process by which our mind sees an image, which he called ‘phantasma’, relative of the roots of words that denote what we may call merely related concepts; being phantasm – essentially an illusion, and phantasmagoria – shifting images as seen when dreaming.

JA: But wouldn’t we include language as well as images?

TH: To be sure, we would. Who can say that imagination does not consist of imagery and language, even of sound too, come to think of it.

JA: But if we conjure up an image, in our mind’s eye, do we not bring it into focus by labeling it? If an image of a table springs to mind, is it not hotly pursued by the label we use to name that piece of furniture?

TH: Would you go so far as to say that the image appears, so to speak, before the word?

JA: That, I cannot freely admit. There is something in our sense of sight, and with it, a familiarity that precludes the need for language, so that we may see a table we utilize regularly without necessarily forming the word, ‘table’. How say you, Sir?

TH: I think I am in accord with you, yes. And I would vouchsafe that the sense of sight, used in the forming of images, even as we ourselves are remote from any images we imagine, is far more prolific in production than any language can ever be.

JA: I take it you mean that when I, for instance, can readily see that good, small village close by Steventon Rectory where I was born, even though I have little recollection of certain people with whom I inevitably came into contact in those early years of my life, I can say with some degree of certainty that whenever I close my eyes, like this, I see an hundred, nay a thousand items, the names and labels of which evade my production of them, even in my thoughts.

TH: That is well said, Madam, and I can concur that although I can see Higher Bockhampton as clearly as if it were here in my hand, I am at a loss to name everything in that image – even as familiar as it is to me.

My juvenilia, my poem, ‘Domicilium’, written by me to further enjoy my home, though nothing could be furthered of my enjoyment of my time there, included all manner of items – high beeches, wild honeysuckle, red roses, lilacs, variegated box – need I go on – I can still see vividly, as vividly and as clearly as if I could bethink myself to stretch out my hand and pluck the fruits and flowers thereof. My point being that although I have such words in my lexicon, my personal collection of words, phrases, sentences, rhymes, verses and I don’t know what else in the cavern of my cranium, I see them before my mind can name them.

JA: How could it be else, Sir? What you see of the places of your youth – colours, hues, feelings associated with such happy times, are too numerous to be given a name each in the instant the image springs into your mental sight.

TH: That is as near to the truth of it as I have yet heard, young lady. But what of your initial question – what part does language play in our imagination, if, as we have deduced, images crowd and collect before words have the chance to even be formed or thought of?

JA: I can only think that language plays a part in any sharpening of our mind’s focus on any particular object – it is then that we divide the totality of phantasm and allow our mind, with the lightness of the wings of a butterfly, to alight on a flower hanging from the boughs of the lilac tree you previously mentioned. Having settled on that petal, our thoughts turn to our language, crowding like angels on the head of a pin, to assist us in our recognition and our attention.

TH: I will go a little further, if you will indulge me, and say that with the word, ‘lilac’ is brought out words like ‘scent’, ‘purple’, ‘fragrance’, and then, if your mind runs quickly to matters of romance, words like ‘love’, and ‘fancy’, ‘heart and soul’, even as another would not so form those words, having other associations than mine to cloud his brain.

JA: So you would say then that your disposition to dwell on the romantic colours your vocabulary in the naming of parts?

TH: I would, wholeheartedly. And as with imagination, so it must be with reality; the associations formed by words are personal and peculiar to me, which is to say they are unique to my mind.

JA: I cannot agree as wholeheartedly as you might wish, Sir. You see, my own associations might run very close to yours, though I grant you that they will not be identical, but nevertheless, is it not the writer’s art to frame words and juxtapose images conjured by them in such a way that a reader will readily identify the associations that you write of in his own mind – the answer must surely be that it is just so.

TH: I see that you are right, but tell me, what makes me pen them so? If these associations are so common, as you seem to be suggesting, why do they strike me as significant enough to mention in the telling of my tales?

JA: Why, Sir, it is because you are gifted that way, and your thoughts incline that way because of your disposition, which is essentially unique in being yours and yours alone.

TH: But you have said that others can identify the associations, what of that?

JA: That that is so is because you are of the same culture as your readers. Were you to be read by a man wearing a loin cloth of animal skin and clambering the heights and depths of the Amazonian rain forests, supposing him to understand English, you might find he was labouring with very different associations.

A fellow pupil of mine went to some part of Africa to teach English in the schools there, and found that although she was inventive in her teaching, that she nevertheless failed utterly to hit the mark in some areas.

Specifically, she related to me the time she wanted to introduce the sonnets of William Shakespeare to a class of young girls. She entreated them to write down on their slates, the name of everything they associated with the word, ‘summer’.

The ladies scribbled furiously, but when she came to look at what they had written, she found words like, ‘disease’, ‘death’, and such. She looked somewhat askance at the words, and on being asked to what purpose the exercise was done, had to reply that she wanted them to be introduced to Sonnet 18, whose opening line begins famously; ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?’

Our good bard’s associations were not at all the same as those young ladies writing under a sweltering sun in the tropical places I speak of – quite the opposite, in fact. and although I do freely admit the tale sounds akin to something from the Apocrypha, it does serve to illustrate the point I wish to make – that one man’s meat is not necessarily another’s.

TH: Presumably then, that is why there are so many varieties of interpretations of what we write.

JA: As many as there are readers, Sir, I think, the reason being that although we frame words by writing them in this order and that, we are totally at a loss to even come close to giving each reader a dominant association of each word – that being entirely the prerogative of the reader. Our literary critics huff and puff so much hot air about what they read, and, having the effrontery to publish their prejudices in journal and newspaper, they then have the further arrogance to suppose that every reader will take from that work, let us call it a play, what they took from it in their offhand reading of it in a carriage home from the theatre afterwards.

But if we first think of a word, rather than of an image, surely that must make us think of other words? I know that is what happens when a word comes into my thoughts.

TH: Here we are dealing with something quite different, I think. Whereas earlier, we were discussing our bringing images to our conscious attention, prior to their being named by us using words, now you are talking about words before things, if I catch you aright, Miss?

JA: You do, Sir. Do we not think of words first as often as we think of things unnamed first?

TH: I would say that we do. When we bring to mind emotions, abstract notions that are rather more ethereal than concrete, names are what we have to know them, are they not?

JA: I think you are right, but with every emotion comes a circumstance in which that emotion is displayed or plays a part, does it not?

TH: That much must be so in your case, dear lady since your writing is chiefly about the emotions that accompany actions, as well as emotions misinterpreted by others.

JA: That is my stock-in-trade, Sir, the misinterpreting of emotions – mistaking love for affection of an entirely different intensity and hue is as regularly done in my great houses as people take tea, say!

TH: Whereas you might say that the malevolence of spirits about which we know very little achieve the mischief that my heroes fall foul of. Language is everything to the writer, as it should be, for we paint a scene, tug a heart string, put a nose out of joint, all with mere words.

JA: Words are never mere anything, Sir, I think you must agree.

TH: Forgive me, a slip of the tongue only.

JA: Still using words.

TH: Words can deceive, encourage, flatter, disdain, lie and tell truths – words can do everything, but let us be their master, for words should not break our world in twain, even as they can sometimes be used to do so.

But getting back to how words form thought; it is as you mention, one word brings out ten with it, and so on until an event, a feeling or emotion, or anything akin to what you might call a circumstance, or a satire of a circumstance as I have often been wont to say, is formed by nothing more real than a collection of black marks on a white page.

JA: It is as you say, sir, words form worlds – build them up in our minds to be communicated to readers.
Robert L. Fielding