November 27, 1912--The sudden death of his wife of
nearly 40 years left Thomas Hardy
(pictured) with more than the grief customary to widowers. To the immediate cause of his
anguish (why hadn’t he noticed that the gall-bladder condition his wife had
recently complained of had deteriorated so quickly?) was added a longer-term
question: How had a relationship begun with so much love evolve into one marked
by so much discord?
Soon, the British man of letters took to sorting out
the answers in an outburst of poems that, most biographers and critics believe,
marked a significant advancement in his achievement in this genre.
Hardy owed his very livelihood to Emma Lavinia Gifford Hardy, as she had
shared his interest in poetry and persuaded him to pursue writing, rather than
his original intended vocation, architecture. Later, unfortunately, it might be said, too, that the
frequent subjects of his novels and poetry (he was one of the few writers whose
achievement was as significant in one form as another), marital misalliances
and fate, owe much to their relationship.
The woman that Hardy wed within two years
after the passing of Emma, Florence Dugdale Hardy, would eventually relate the story that the writer had
married his first wife not knowing she was five years younger than she claimed.
However, even at her real age, she was still several months younger than Thomas.
It was more likely that the two were driven apart by temperament and the
changes that time could bring.
When he first came to her father’s rectory as a
30-year-old architecture apprentice, Hardy was struck by Emma’s “golden curls
and rosy colour” as she rode around the countryside in her horse, as well as by
what the writer’s biographer Robert Gittings characterized as her “willfulness and
lack of restraint.” But as she drifted into middle age, she no longer wore her
hair long, her face grew heavier, and her eccentric digressions with friends
became a source of increasing embarrassment to her husband. Nor were there children to bind them together.
Even worse, by the 1890s, when two of his novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, had ignited
controversies over what was then deemed sexual explicitness, Emma—by this time
having become religiously conservative—had become embarrassed by her husband. In the same decade, his increasing emotional
attachment to younger women may have become a source of tension between the
two.
(Oddly enough, in the last years of her life, Emma
did not notice the budding relationship between her husband and the woman who
would succeed her as his wife. Florence, four decades younger than Thomas,
became friends with the wife as well as the poet, which seems to have thrown
off what would have been Emma’s normal suspicions.)
By the time of her death, Emma had taken to sleeping
apart from her husband in a room in the attic, and had her meals taken up there.
Her 72nd birthday had passed uncelebrated, and she had suddenly
announced that she would no longer play the piano, a longtime source of comfort
for her.
Within a month of Emma’s passing, Hardy had already
begun his private summing-up. In “The Voice,” he addressed her directly, immediately, as “woman much missed.” At
the same time, he is also acknowledging—and wondering—to himself (and, as it
happened when published, to the larger reading public), why “you had
changed/from the one who was all to me.”
Emma’s death, according to Hardy biographer Claire
Tomalin, became “the moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet”:
“They are among the most original elegies ever
written, in feeling and in the handling of both language and verse forms. They
do not spare the truth about the unhappiness suffered by wife and husband, but
they move into the past with an expansiveness and panache he had never found
before.”
Nearly a century later, another British poet would
come to a late-life reckoning with the ghost of his first wife. Ted Hughes felt a great affinity for
Hardy’s intense interests in nature and memory. Perhaps not so coincidentally,
he also sought to make sense of a troubled—in fact, deeply
controversial—marriage, to the American poet Sylvia Plath. In 1998, 35 years
after her suicide, Hughes responded, belatedly, to accusations that he had
caused her death with a cycle of poems about their relationship, Birthday Letters.
Hughes—whose mistress also took her life six years after
Plath had killed herself—would probably have endorsed Hardy’s notion that women
represented “the most vivifying and disturbing influence in human life.”
(Photograph of
Thomas Hardy from the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)
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