From Pygmalion to Persephone: Love, Art, Myth in Thomas Hardy’s The Well-Beloved

Recent Work on Pygmalion in Nineteenth‐Century Literature

“…In some ways more precise than Thomas on the complex psychic investment of writers in Galatea’s transformation is Patricia Pulham’s ‘From Pygmalion to Persephone: Love, Art, Myth in Thomas Hardy’s The Well‐Beloved ’ (2008). Like Thomas, Pulham relates Hardy’s exploration of the female ideal in his novel to neo‐platonic artistic theories of the period, claiming that the Pygmalion myth ‘is implicit in The Well‐Beloved ’ (221).…”