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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
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VICTORIANS failed quite fast. Hardy married up, and his f rst wife, Emma Gif ord, who was well read, funny and beautiful, with aspirations to become a writer, felt her social superiority. So too did her family: her father wrote of Hardy as ‘a low-born churl who has presumed to marry into my family’. Tensions quickly arose on both sides. Soon there was open hostility between Emma and her in-laws. Jemima, who in her late seventies still walked out in wintry weather to enjoy the beauties of nature, remained in old age ‘matchless in might’, as Hardy wrote in his poem ‘In Tenebris’, and succinct in expression. Emma, she declared, was ‘a thing of a ’ooman … She were wrong for I.’ She were wrong for Hardy too, and their unhappiness was no secret. At f rst she helped him with his work, acting as copyist and general amanuensis. But she was upset by some of his writing, particularly his love poems about other women (they were too ‘personal – moans, & fancies etc’), and thought he was getting at her with his ‘stabbings by pen’, especially in Jude the Obscure, which attacked marriage for being a wretched system that based a permanent contract on a temporary feeling. As his success grew, she felt more and more hurt and betrayed. Visitors recorded their observations of her and of them as a couple. She was mocked; he was pitied. Byrne works hard to be fair to the bright, active, disappointed wife. But even Emma’s ways of consoling herself seem a bit ridiculous. She decided that around the age of f fty ‘a man’s feelings too often take a new course altogether. Eastern ideas of matrimony secretly pervade his thoughts, & he wearies of the most perfect and suitable wife chosen in his earlier life.’ Hardy thought that his most perfect wife was mentally ill (her brother was in a madhouse) and Byrne eventually concurs (‘if there is to be a posthumous diagnosis – always a speculative venture’) and cites the authoritative Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to suggest that she suf ered from schizotypal personality disorder. Hardy’s second wife, the much younger Florence Dugdale, had befriended Emma and later came to feel that she was becoming her. Florence struggled to reconcile her love for the man and admiration of the writer with the realities of Hardy’s writing life: long hours of silent absorption in his study from which emerged treacherous-seeming words. In Hardy’s imagination, Emma took on saintly qualities and inspired some of his best poems. Her ghost haunted Florence, who was also jealous of living rivals like the actress Gertrude Bugler, who played Tess, and with whom Hardy became infatuated. Paula Byrne’s decision to focus on the women produces a portrait of a guarded artist in his unguarded moments. She makes no claim to being comprehensive and yet it is perhaps a fuller picture than the standard ‘cradle to grave’ biographies. Liking women, being liked by them, suited Hardy. (T ere were many, and this is a long and fascinating book.) His mother and sisters adored him, he was happy with his muses, his wives paid the price. rosemary ashton Crape Expectations Rites of Passage: Death and Mourning in Victorian Britain By Judith Flanders (Picador 336pp £25) Judith Flanders has undertaken a mammoth task. T e Victorian period is widely known for its excessive, some- times scarcely believable interest in death and everything that surrounds it. T ere are so many set pieces involving death in the f ction of the era, not least the scenes of children dying in Dickens’s writings. T e demise of Little Nell in T e Old Curios- ity Shop notoriously caused grown men to weep on both sides of the Atlantic when the book was serialised in 1840–41. T e protracted dying of poor Jo the crossing- sweeper in Bleak House (1852–3) shows Dickens putting sentiment surround- ing the death of a child to good use in the cause of political and social criti- cism. T e narrator sums up the terrible life and death of this destitute child, one of so many ‘dying thus around us every day ’. And who is being addressed here? ‘Dead, your Majesty. Dead, my lords and gentlemen. Dead, Right Reverends and Wrong Reverends of every order.’ T us far, a modern reader is likely to be wholly on Dickens’s side as he lambasts those in authority for doing nothing for the poor. But, as Flanders points out in one of many sharp literary critical insights in her book, the young doctor, Allan Woodcourt, who f nds Jo dying in the street ‘does not do anything as medically prosaic as taking his pulse or attempting a diagnosis’, but rather ‘helps the child stumble his way through the Lord’s Prayer’. T e narrator’s attitude towards this is unclear. Is Dickens satirising the apparent favouring of piety over practical medical help or accepting that it is too late to do anything and endorsing the piety, even though it is directed at a child who knows nothing of the Christian faith? Lest we think that Dickens exaggerates the details of death and dying in his time, Flanders f nds examples from real life to put beside the death of Jo. T ese show how wide a gulf exists between at least some modern and some V i c t o r i an a t t i t ude s . Priscilla Maurice, sister of the theologian Frederick Denison Maurice, published a successful work in 1851 entitled Sickness: Its Trials and Blessings. In it, she suggests that those caring for the sick and dying should ‘speak to them of sin, of pardon, of “the blood of Christ which cleanest from all sin”’. T e most celebrated – if that is the word – Victorian response to a death was Queen Victoria’s lifelong mourning of her husband, Albert, who died in 1861, when she was forty-two. Flanders calls her ‘the woman who lived with the dead’. It is well known that she wore black for the rest of her life and refused for many years to perform the usual duties of the monarch. Flanders of ers some startling details: Victoria apparently had 231 portraits of Albert – paintings, drawings, etchings and photographs – in her private rooms february 2024 | Literary Review 7

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

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