Muses, lovers, sisters, wives – Thomas Hardy’s trouble with women

On the menu of great literary lives, Thomas Hardy is a tough egg. Almost a century after his death, it’s hard to fully conjure, still less quite to comprehend, the spell his novels exerted over his Victorian, Edwardian, and finally, his inter-war modernist readers. Simultaneously, his reputation as a poet continues to soar.

Even in his own time, the drift and span of Hardy’s inspiration was strange and remarkable. Here was a writer, born remote from metropolitan society, who had witnessed a public hanging as a boy and survived into the age of Marconi, the machine gun and the Ford Model T. To a unique degree, he had known popular acclaim as a bestselling novelist (Far fom the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure etc), as well as the awestruck admiration of contemporary poets for influential collections of verse such as Satires of Circumstance (1914). Both DH Lawrence the novelist, and Philip Larkin the poet, among many 20th-century greats, declare an explicit debt to Hardy. In this quirky reappraisal, Paula Byrne, the latest celebrant of his genius, rightly salutes “some of the greatest love poems in the English language”.

During his prime, which was remarkably evergreen, Hardy’s life as a writer, magnified by the power of the fin-de-siecle mass media, became exposed to many of the trials familiar to famous writers today. His numerous fans, American as much as British, could not get enough of him; his family was always a torment. Notoriously, Hardy’s paranoia about his biography was hardly assuaged by his first wife, Emma. The journal, discovered after her death in 1912, (“What I Think About My Husband”), inspired the poet’s fiery and apocalyptic riposte: during the summer of 1918, Hardy made a bonfire of his manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks and press cuttings.

Subsequently, in the final decade of a long life, this quiet, secretive, and rather shy man became more and more obsessive about policing access to his personal life. After the bonfire, he fell into a congenial conspiracy in which he commissioned his second wife Florence to put her name to an “official” biography that he himself would draft. Florence, a published writer, would then pass off this document as her “memoir”, partly abetted by JM Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.

How do you approach a writer whose afterlife has been refracted – by himself as much as his biographers – through so many distorting lenses? The Neverland of Hardy’s paranoid creation has since been demystified by some distinguished biographies: a life in two volumes (1975-78) by Robert Gittings; in 2006, Claire Tomalin’s Time-Torn Man, and Ralph Pite’s Guarded Life. Looming over these lives is the work of Michael Millgate, which includes his eight-volume edition of Hardy’s letters (1978-2012), and the magisterial Thomas Hardy: A Biography Revisited (2006).

Byrne, confronted by this pre-history and its backlist, is briskly moved to declare, of any future Hardy biography, that “we do not need another one”. But then, the spell of old Wessex exerts itself and, as a moth to a flame, Byrne finds herself drawn into Hardy’s enthralling, lost landscape, “to bring back to life” the women (muses, sisters, wives) who were central to his imagination. Ironically, it is Hardy’s first wife who provides the cruel epigraph to this re-examination. Her husband, wrote Emma, “understands only the women he invents – the others not at all”.

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Actually, the best parts of Byrne’s revisionist examination are less “the women he made” (from Bathsheba Everdene to Tess Durbeyfield) than the “women who made him”, from Jemima his dominating mother to Tryphena his cousin. One of Byrne’s useful demonstrations is just how many women – and there are an awful lot of them – contributed to the making of the tortured, mysterious, solitary, at times tyrannical, “class-torn”, depressive, and divided figure of Thomas – Tommy or Tom – Hardy. Starting in 1840, the year of his birth, Byrne’s narrative (which relies heavily on a voracious reading of published sources) places an extraordinary cast of female characters from his native Dorset in the landscape we still call Hardy’s Wessex.

The young, would-be writer was always falling in love, often with two or three women at once. But no love was stronger than his devotion to the society in which he grew up, the wild heath and secret combes surrounding Dorchester and its county gaol. Excluding Wordsworth and Shakespeare, no English writer has derived a greater inspiration from the world of his childhood.

Perhaps it was this that fired Hardy’s unquenchable ardour for Mary, Maria, Julia, Martha, Louisa, Patty, Kate, Margaret, Amabel, Jane, Tryffie, Cassie and the rest. They certainly gave him, from his mid-twenties, the rare confidence to narrate his poetry and fiction from a female point of view.

Hardy’s lifelong susceptibility to the charm of beautiful women becomes Byrne’s inevitable theme, but her analysis gets into difficulties in its middle passage. By now, he’s married to Emma Gifford, who will start as muse and end as a mad-woman in an attic, bent over that vituperative journal. When Byrne analyses “the women he made” (Eustacia Vye, Elizabeth-Jane Henchard et al), the passionate heroines of the novelist’s maturity, she gets diminishing returns, missing the simple clarity of his biography.

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Art and artist do not illuminate each other. Hardy’s fiction and its relation to the women in his life offers few dividends, not least because the Wessex of the novels is such a romantic fabrication, replete with archetypes and suspended revelations (aka cliffhangers). Nor does the psychology translate from one genre to another. A woman such as Tess can become a heart-rending protagonist in Tess of the d’Urbervilles. In reality, Byrne concedes, she was “an attractive maid milking her cows in her grandfather’s dairy in Dorset”. Hardy himself could not bear to describe Tess’s fate as “rape” rather than “seduction”. The boy who was always in love became the novelist for whom women were versions of a romantic ideal. Henry James (Hardy’s exact contemporary) was onto this. Having read Far from the Madding Crowd, he declared that the only believable things in the novel were “the sheep and the dogs”.

The super-charged dramas of a romantic spirit haunted his afterlife. On Hardy’s death in 1928, his ashes were interred in Poet’s Corner, after his family had saved his heart for burial in Wessex. But local rumour said that Cobweb, his cat, had dined on it first.

‘Hardy Women’ by Paula Byrne (Harper Collins), £25.00, pp. 640