"Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad."

Bates finds little to like in Hardy — lambasting his convoluted plots, 'overburdened prose,' and fatalistic morality — except his occasional ability to create memorable novelistic atmosphere.

In contrast, Conrad is praised for his 'sublime and poetic' prose, novels 'supercharged with emotion,' and an even more remarkable capacity to create atmosphere. Bates describes Hardy as a writer already dated, Conrad one whose work will endure.

Bates had previously critically contrasted Hardy against W.H. Hudson in a 1932 essay 'A Traveller in Little Things'. Despite his misgivings about Hardy's oeuvre, Bates named Tess as one his favourite fictional characters, (John O'London's Weekly, October 6, 1934, p. 4, attached).

In The English Novelists: A Survey of the Novel by Twenty Contemporary Novelists (Ed. Derek Verschoyle, London: Chatto & Windus, 1936, pp. 231-244, attached). Extracts about Hardy reprinted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, Vol 4, pp. 161-162)