The novelist had a profound sympathy for his female characters, but not his wives
HARDY WOMEN Mother, sisters, wives, muses
PAULA BYRNE 656pp. William Collins. £25.
THROUGHOUT HIS LIFE Thomas Hardy was gratified to receive fan mail from women who had been moved by Tess of the d’Urbervilles. His novel about a country girl who has an illegitimate baby and, after much suffering, kills her seducer, but never loses her essential innocence or integrity, continued to touch a nerve with female readers long after its first publication in 1891. Hardy’s correspondents were amazed that in creating Tess he had intuited their deepest secrets. “Some of my own experiences in life have been not unlike hers”, confided twenty-year-old Emily Pass from New York in 1927. “I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.” Louise Moog from The Hague was even more direct: “That killed fellow was the cause of it all”, she wrote. “Several troubles I have had, I met in this book. Oh, I wish that there are more people in the world as you are, for you understand a woman.”
Hardy’s unjudgemental depiction of female sexuality was rare for his time. Where his contemporaries typically treated it as either dangerous or debased, he made room in the English novel for female agency and female desire. By considering Hardy’s development through the prism of his relationships with the women in his life – from his mother and his sisters to his wives and literary friends – Paula Byrne’s riveting new biography sets out to account for one of the most distinctive features of his vision: his profound sympathy with the female experience. In Tess Hardy tells us that it is inevitably “the woman” who “pays” in her interactions with men. This raises an intriguing question. Which of these “Hardy women” (the pun is deliberate: as Byrne reveals, they had to endure quite a lot) finally paid the price of his overwhelming fame?
Hardy attracted notice as a creator of rustic scenes almost from the outset. He was keen to promote this image: Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), his second published novel and the first of the series that would become known as the Wessex novels, is subtitled “A rural painting of the Dutch school”. It’s an apt parallel, not least because, like the Dutch masters, Hardy was almost always more interested in depicting the domestic lives of women, and especially of agricultural working-class women, than he was in illustrating the public lives of their menfolk. But if you were to look for the sources of this sympathy in his official biography, The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy – released after his death in 1928 as the work of his second wife, Florence – you’d be forgiven for feeling frustrated.
The Life and Work is unusual among literary biographies in having been ghost-writt
