Book review: English writer Thomas Hardy is often associated with memorable female characters: Tess from Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd or Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure. They are characters who have been made more memorable by numerous film and television adaptations.
Author Paula Byrne has structured her study of Hardy around the women who inspired and obsessed him. The book has 71 chapters, all but one of which is named after a woman, and including a handful about Hardy’s fictional characters. Her prologue hooks the reader.
Hardy was a very private man, fearful of what later biographers might say about him. So much so that in 1918, he burnt pages of manuscripts, notebooks, reviews and correspondence. The destruction was driven by the diary kept by his first wife Emma, which his second wife Florence compared with her own, “… but when I remember the awful diary that the first Mrs T. H. kept full of venom, hatred, and abuse of him and his family, I am afraid to do more than chronicle facts.”
Florence and Hardy collaborated on a secret work. Hardy wrote his own biography for publication after his death, written in the third person and to be branded as his “official” biography by Florence.
One of the insights that did survive from Hardy’s first wife was that, “He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.” Hardy Women divides his life and the women he encountered into age periods, beginning with childhood and the mother, sisters and cousins who played a part in the writer’s early development.
Even here, things are not straightforward, since the list also includes other influences, such as land owners, philanthropists and even a woman who Hardy witnesses being hanged for the murder of her husband.
The unexpected links are fascinating. Themes of drunken husbands and domestic violence appear again and again, and very soon we see numerous topics that recur in Hardy’s novels, things he saw all too often in his youth.
After the childhood sections, we move to Hardy’s period of apprenticeship before setting off around England with periods spent in London, Weymouth and Cornwall. This is followed by detailed sections about the women Hardy created in his novels, so often amalgams of many of the women he knew in real life.
Although the book is obviously concerned with the women who influenced Hardy’s life, this does mean that we lose a little balance in the picture of his childhood. His father is a minor character and one who appears only because his wife frequently chides him for his lack of ambition.
By contrast, Hardy’s friend Horace Moule, a brilliant young scholar who tutored Hardy as a boy and encouraged him as a writer, is the only male character to have a chapter in the book. While Moule encouraged Hardy, he also counselled him against applying to study at Cambridge University, a rejection that Hardy later channelled into Jude the Obscure.
It is easy to come away from this book with a poor view of Hardy; as a flirt, as a user of women and someone happy to apply some of the double standards that he bestowed on many of the male characters in his novels.
While married to his first wife, Hardy tried to seduce a young writer, Florence Henniker. Her gentle rejection of his wish to kiss her was the inspiration for some of Hardy’s better poetry. But his double standard of supporting women’s emancipation and modern views seems at odds with his own lascivious thoughts and actions. Filled with spite at Florence’s rejection, Hardy wrote a story called An Imaginative Woman, in which there are multiple similarities to his failures with her.
The final section of the book is dominated by Hardy’s first wife, Emma, initially by her increasingly odd behaviour, then by her declining health, and finally by her death, which had a profound effect on Hardy. Having been unhappy in his marriage for many years, Emma’s death seemed to push Hardy to remember only the brief good times and forget the misery of the rest.
He had already found himself a replacement in Florence Dugdale, a writer of children’s stories and 39 years younger than him. In a strange turn of events, Florence found herself living with the Hardys, working as an assistant to Thomas while befriending Emma.
In many people’s mind, Hardy is primarily a novelist, although the truth is that he spent many more years writing poetry after the rough reception of Jude the Obscure in 1895. He spent the next 30 years producing eight collections of poetry. Wife Florence made a very astute observation about his poetry, noting that he had become so infatuated by the beautiful young actress playing Tess in a local theatre production that he was inspired to write new poems. This was “always a sign of wellbeing with him. Needless to say, it is a dismal poem.”
Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne (Williams Collins, $42.99) is out now.
