Barbara Hardy obituary

The literary scholar Barbara Hardy, who has died aged 92, delighted in the challenge of a good argument. Because she never forgot that literature was made from human experience, she was astringently sceptical of theory: particularity and clarity grounded her work.

They were also its themes, from The Novels of George Eliot: A Study in Form (1959), via The Appropriate Form (1964) and Tellers and Listeners (1975), to the detail-packed George Eliot: A Critic’s Biography (2006). Barbara preferred the term truthfulness to the abstract technical term “realism”. Her humanism meant that though she believed the reader’s “narrative curiosity” was aroused by form, form in a novel or poem was always balanced by feeling, pattern by the particularity of detail. The interaction between a writer and a reader was central to her thinking.