Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses

by Paula Byrne

William Collins 2024

In an age that has put a premium on amplifying female voices, Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women, which came out this year, promises to do just that. With this unconventional biography of Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (famed for his vividly-drawn female heroines such as Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd), Byrne seeks to re-write the narrative of Hardy’s life through the eyes of the women he knew, both real and fictional, so as to come closer to the emotional world of the man, who, in his old age, and gripped by anxiety about how posterity would receive him, did so much to throw dust in the eyes of future historians and obscure the identity of his many muses.

Byrne, through diligent and masterful detective work, uncovers the obscure parts of his lifelong fascination (invariably erotic) with women. She identifies the names and the places, tracking Hardy’s romantic dalliances over the course of a lifetime, and highlighting in encyclopaedic detail their connection to the poems and novels that he wrote in six decades of tireless creation, during which he broke hearts and had his heart broken in turn.

Byrne pre-empts those who would ask why yet another biography of this already-celebrated figure needs to be written. We are helpfully told in the prologue that the discovery of fresh correspondence on the part of both Hardy and his second wife, Florence, has assisted the author’s research efforts. As Byrne says, “There are many excellent ‘cradle to grave’ biographies of Thomas Hardy. We do not need another one.”

Instead, the book looks at Hardy’s life from three different angles. The first part of the book deals with the women that influenced him as a child and as a young man as he built a life for himself between London and his native Dorset. In steps his fierce and domineering mother Jemima, a maidservant whose anxiety over her low birth and ambition to overcome her plebeian origins were passed over to her son, along with her superstition; his grandmother Mary, whose tales of life in their native Dorset during the Napoleonic Wars would inspire Hardy’s historical novel, The Trumpet-Major and his verse-drama The Dynasts; his romantic entanglement with his female Sparks cousins (especially Tryphena, to whom he was engaged for a brief while); local landlady Julia Martin, who took the boy Hardy under her wing, oversaw his education and provoked a premature sexual awakening; his affairs with Eliza Nicholls and her sister Jane; and at least two other women to whom he was abortively engaged, Mary Waight and Cassie Pole.

During this section of the book, Hardy himself occasionally gets lost in the sheer stream of people with which Byrne populates her narrative. An entire chapter on the mother of his close friend Horace Moule, whose influence on Hardy seems, on evidence, to have been largely indirect, is indicative of a flaw (by no means fatal) in the execution of the work: that the biographer seems overly keen to share too much of her research.

Where it shines is in the latter half, which deals with Hardy’s relationship with the women he created in his works and the lingering influence of those old loves that he never got over, not least his estranged first wife, Emma, whose death unleashed an outpouring of grief and regret that went into some of the greatest love poems ever written in the language, much to the irritation of his second wife Florence. Byrne’s summaries of the novels and her analysis of the characters is flawless and backed by judicious excerpts from the works concerned (well-known already to those who are Hardy fans), whilst her dissection of the poems is deeply insightful and a useful companion to read alongside the poems themselves. A minor source of irritation is that often she neglects to use speech marks when discussing the novels, making it unclear whether she is simply summarising or quoting verbatim from Hardy’s narrator.

There is a grim sense of voyeurism to the reading experience, as we are taken into parts of Hardy’s life that he tried desperately to keep from prying eyes. One senses that it would be wrong, but with a guide as sensitive and as empathetic as Byrne, these fears are quickly dispelled. It is informative without being salacious and sympathetic without being hagiographic. It treats both Hardy and the women he was emotionally involved with respectfully. This is not for the lay reader who has never read a word by Hardy, but for the Hardy lover who wants to find out more about what lies behind the man and his works, Byrne’s book is indispensable reading.

Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and reviewer living in London.