‘And that Hardy is not what you could call an active sadist; that his quaint notion of the sort of masculinity women pine for, where it is more than merely Victorian melodrama, is a projection from inadequacy not brutality?’

I nodded. ‘I was on the point of saying that very thing,’ I explained, ‘when you came in.’ Well I was. That might sound petulant, but it was quite upsetting to have a lecture lifted straight out of my hands. And to see the light of comprehension begin to shine in those previously unlit countenances. The annoying thing was that she was not a jot more lucid than I was, really – she just had a way of marching up and down in front of them, tossing chalk that she had no intention of using from one hand to another, and looking as if she would swing for her convictions – which made them think she was.

She had the natural tyrant’s ability, also, to fix each person separately with her stare, so as to create an individual bond of loyalty based on fear. Within five minutes she had over thirty such individual bonds ratified in that room. The world, I was reminded, could never resist a despot. And I wasn’t planning any revolutions myself.

‘It is quiet men of private fears and perturbation,’ she went on, ‘who nourish the fantasy that women enjoy nothing better than a thrashing. The ordinarily outgoing brute who beats his wife doesn’t suppose that he is thereby providing for her needs while he is satisfying his own. Thus the violence done on Hardy’s heroines is always essentially vicarious, connived at by the author but inflicted in another’s name. The daemon, you see, must be free to watch and feel the pain himself. The seduction of Bathsheba, the rape of Tess, the subjugation of Elfride, are all observed as by an injured third party, jealously. And the more assured the rival’s mastery, that’s to say the more complete the woman’s surrender, then the more exquisite the sense of injury. In that sense Mr Fugleman is right’ (that’s what she said, the bitch!) ‘to be drawing your attention to the possibility that Hardy was using his novels to have the women he loved, real or imaginary – it comes to the same thing – violated by proxy.’

She paused, in order to allow a question. ‘That’s p. .r. .o. .x. .y,’ she replied.