From a letter to English novelist Louis Golding:

Since you would certainly have received a copy of The Judge if you had stayed put among my coffee-cups your suggestion that I should send it to you is very sound. But I am broke, so I will wait till I get my American presentation copies. I do hope you'll like the second part better than the first, because all nice people do. Thomas Hardy makes his wife read it to him over and over again, it being the only book ever written as gloomy as his own. His wife told me this in accents of incredible bitterness.

--Selected Letters of Rebecca West, Bonnie Kime Scott, editor