VICTORIANS
norma clarke
Sue Bridehead Revisited Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses
By Paula Byrne (William Collins 656pp £25)
Hardy with his second wife, Florence Dugdale, on Aldeburgh Beach
The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on T omas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s f ctional women. Bath- sheba Everdene in Far f rom the Madding Crowd, Tess Durbeyf eld in Tess of the d ’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense and began with the publication of Far f rom the Madding Crowd, rested to a large extent on the heroines he created. One young reader wrote to him of Tess, ‘I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.’ Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’
It is the ‘others’ that Byrne turns her attention to in this ambitious book, split, like Tess of the d ’Urbervilles, into three ‘phases’: ‘T e women who made him’ (forty-six chapters, mostly named after dif erent women), ‘T e women he made’ (eight chapters) and ‘T e women he loved and the women he lost ’ (seventeen chapters). Stories told by women who knew Hardy or whose foremothers knew him
‘have often been ignored or simply not believed’, Byrne writes. T ere is also the fact that Hardy made a bonf re of many relevant documents, including the journal ‘What I T ink of My Husband’ that Emma left for him to discover after her death in 1912. Real women ‘paid a large price’, Byrne argues, for the ‘magnif cent f ctional women he invented’. T ey ‘shaped his passions and his imagination’.
T e hardiest of Hardy women was his long-lived mother, Jemima. She and her sisters were strong-minded, straight-talking countrywomen – Jemima’s speech is described as ‘vernacular’ and ‘muscular’ – who valued oral tradition while negotiating the hard realities of sexual double standards. Plenty of them, including Jemima, became pregnant outside of wedlock. T ey knew poverty and domestic violence. Hardy was devoted to his mother and her sisters and enthralled by their stories. Although success took him to London, he chose to root himself close to his childhood home in Bockhampton by building a mansion, Max Gate, on the edge of Dorchester. Family and locale came f rst with him. He drew on people he knew for his characters, including his extended family. It ’s no accident that he moved back temporarily to live with his mother while writing Far f rom the Madding Crowd .
Tess, who is an innocent, was not based on any specif c individual. She was all the seduced countrywomen Hardy knew, and none of them. T e subtitle he chose was deliberately provocative: ‘A Pure Woman’. T e novel blames men for the fate of ‘fallen’ women. It seems simple now, as does so much of what Hardy believed. For the reviewer in the Quarterly Review, the very idea that Tess could be described as pure ‘put a strain on the English language’.
Hardy felt for women and was excited by them. Pretty girls turned his head. Byrne emphasises (perhaps too much) his tendency as a young man to fall in love and make promises, before changing his mind when another beauty crossed his path. Aesthetics, erotics and melodrama drove his writing – he understood yearning and passion, along with remorse and guilt, and needed them in his life. At sixteen he witnessed the public hanging of Elizabeth Martha Brown, who had killed her husband. As an old man he recalled ‘what a f ne f gure she showed against the sky as she hung in the misty rain, and how the tight black silk gown set of her shape as she wheeled half-round and back’. Byrne’s prologue gives us a vignette of the hanged woman, the fascinated boy and the troubled old man. T is is followed by a description of Hardy burning notebooks and papers in 1918, determined that nobody should write about his personal life. Hoping to forestall would-be biographers, he prepared an account of his own life for posthumous publication, pretending it had been written by his second wife.
Fame brought many more women into Hardy’s life. It pleased him to be petted by aristocratic ladies. It isn’t clear how much he suf ered a sense of disloyalty to class and kin – or felt himself to be a ‘deserter of your own lot ’, as Berta in T e Hand of Ethelberta is called by her brother when she marries an elderly aristocrat (thus rescuing her family from poverty). Family af ection never failed. His unmarried sister Mary remained emotionally dependent on him until she died and he was a willing f nancial supporter of other family members too.
Married love, however, seems to have
Literary Review | february 2024 6