Neutral Tones

“Paula Byrne on Hardy Women” by 5 X 15 (2024)

In this video, historian Paula Byrne gives a talk about her scholarly book, Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses (2024), which discusses the important women in Hardy’s life. Here, she briefly covers Hardy’s relationships with his mother, sisters, and two wives, Emma and Florence. At the seven-minute mark, she discusses his relationship with Eliza Bright Nicholls, connecting their breakup to “Neutral Tones.” Byrne notes how “the secret affair” and “jilt[ing]” of Eliza was not believed by scholars until “fairly recently” when the annotated text of The Christian Year showed “that the story was indubitably true.” She notes that Hardy “treated some of the women in his life incredibly badly but he wrote about them so sympathetically.”

“Comparing Love Poetry: Thomas Hardy’s ‘Neutral Tones’ and Maura Dooley’s ‘Letters From Yorkshire’” by Jen Chan (2021)

While this article eventually compares the poems, the information on “Neutral Tones” is self-contained and offers an in-depth look at the color palette of Hardy’s poem and his use of end rhymes, enjambment, and end-stops. Chan notes that “the absence of colour signals a lack of feeling, and in turn, conveys the fading away of love.” She also asserts that Hardy’s use of end rhymes enhances the theme—for example, with “rove” (Line 5) and “love” (Line 8) in Stanza 2 of “Neural Tones.” She suggests that the couple’s “physical reunion by the pond and their reminder of a shared experience (reinforced by the visual likeness of ‘rove’ and ‘love’)” is now ended as they become “two separate individuals who harbour different feelings about their past.” She also discusses enjambment to show the stop-start nature of the emotions in the poem. Earlier in the article, Chan discusses Hardy as an iconoclast who found fault with Victorian mores, and she notes, “[T]he reference to a ‘God curst sun’ in ‘Neutral Tones’ is just one example reflecting his doubts about this notion of a kind theistic agent.”

“Eliza Bright Nicholls: New Sources and Old Problems” by Michael Millgate and Stephen Mottram (2010)

This article is an extensive look at Eliza’s involvement with Hardy and details the discovery of how Hardy came to be in possession of John Keble’s The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year in 1861. Further, Millgate and Mottram indicate the correlations of dates of Hardy’s visits to the same places where Eliza was located, including a “disguised reference to Eliza’s family’s home village of Findon that Hardy inserted into it as late as 1867.” The 1867 dates coincide with the composition of “Neutral Tones.” Millgate and Mottram also discuss Eliza’s posthumous personal effects, noting,

There was no sign of the ring that, so Mrs. Headley reported, Eliza had often spoken of Hardy’s having given her, nor of the two manuscripts or notebooks of his that she was said to have owned, but the presence of the unquestionably authentic Hardy photograph constituted—and constitutes still—powerful evidence of his having indeed shared with Eliza a relationship of considerable closeness.

The authors also assert that the “comprehensive desolation of ‘Neutral Tones,’ specifically dated to 1867, almost insists on that poem’s being read as directly related to that final break with Eliza, even as a vivid enactment of an actual occasion.”