How Thomas Hardy would have hated this book. In his 70s, this most secretive of men burned old letters, diaries and manuscripts on a bonfire in his garden. His paranoia had been stoked by the publication of a critical biography. “Too personal, and in bad taste, even supposing it were true, which it is not!” he wrote indignantly in the margin.
His solution was to seize control of the narrative with a sleight of hand designed to make it seem as if he wasn’t there at all. He wrote his own life story in the third person, to be published as a posthumous biography purportedly authored by his second wife, Florence. In it he made his position clear: “Poetry is emotion put into measure. The emotion must come by nature, but the measure can be acquired by art.”
The measure, then, is what converts the tedious or distressing detritus of the everyday into forms that last. Don’t expect any investigation of that intricate, mysterious process here. This is an unashamedly biographical raid on Hardy, an attempt to chip out the real passions that may or may not have given rise to his profound, unforgettable, still strangely modern work. It’s definitely too personal, certainly in bad taste, and yet it illuminates the harsh, complex lives of working-class Victorian women, the milkmaids, servants and teachers that Hardy was so radical in placing at the centre of his world.
The basic lineaments of his life have long been familiar. Born an impoverished country boy, he died a writer so acclaimed that the Prince of Wales came to his house for lunch. His first wife, Emma, provided succour and ideas during his apprentice years and was shunned in his ascent. He forgot her birthday and shut her ruthlessly out of his books, leading her to write in fury: “He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.” He began a liaison with a younger woman, Florence, who moved into the house as Emma’s companion and secretary (she was discomfited when Emma remarked on Hardy’s resemblance to the notorious wife-poisoner Dr Crippen). But Emma’s death in 1912 brought a reversal of feeling. Hardy married his new bride while writing poem after poem of longing and self-reproach for the woman he’d just buried.
Byrne’s book is a chronological accounting of all the women in his life, from the tangential to the foundational. His mother, sisters, cousins, wives and friends are all here, alongside the women he invented: Bathsheba Everdene, her gown rustling in the ferns; Tess with her breath of milk and honey; even Paula Power in her gymnasium, “wheeling and undulating in the air like a gold-fish in its globe”. As he put it himself, Hardy demolished the doll of English literature, replacing it with women so nuanced in their character and so alive in their struggles that they seem almost real.
They aren’t, of course, and Byrne’s persistent attempts to find direct correlation between the two realms is sometimes strained, a type of confirmation bias in which what’s sought is always found, without being necessarily illuminating. Her largest claim is that she’s identified the subject of many of the Wessex Poems, including Neutral Tones (“one of the most tragic stories of Hardy’s women, a Miss Havisham tale of his very own”). This woman, Eliza Nicholls, is a complex figure in Hardy scholarship. She was almost certainly engaged to Hardy, but the main evidence is a family story passed to a biographer by Nicholls’s niece along with a photograph of the young Hardy. Claire Tomalin was wary of making too much of it in her 2006 biography, The Time-Torn Man. Byrne uses more recent research on a coded diary to identify Nicholls as the direct source and inspiration for writing that could be imagination, wish-fulfilment or composite.
She’s on firmer ground with Hardy’s wives. In a desperate letter, Florence wrote of the grief-suffused poems her new husband was writing to the woman he’d so recently despised: “It seems to me that I am an utter failure if my husband can publish such a sad sad book.” (In a tarter mood, she observed that writing poetry was “always a sign of wellbeing with him. Needless to say it is an intensely dismal poem.”)
I’m not a completely neutral witness here. The sad-eyed second Mrs Hardy was my grandmother’s aunt. When I was just starting out as a journalist, I found myself at lunch next to a very grand writer. The conversation turned to Hardy and I ventured that I was related to Florence. “The one who killed all her predecessor’s cats?” she replied, having just encountered Florence’s so-called “putsch” in The Time-Torn Man. It was the last time I tried to rest on my Hardy laurels.
I’m glad that Byrne thinks Florence was too much of an animal lover to go about killing her rival’s cats. That said, I’d still rather read the novels than ponder their original sources. The best of Hardy, the most original, lies in the women he made up.
• Olivia Laing’s The Garden Against Time is published by Picador (£20) in May. Hardy Women by Paula Byrne is published by William Collins (£25) in the UK and by Harper Collins ($37.99) in Australia on 1 May. To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com
