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Thomas Hardy with his second wife, Florence. Photograph: Getty Images An exhaustive biography of Thomas Hardy’s romantic life is most fascinating when it chronicles his complicated menage with his wife and a young typist If only I had the talent, I would write the play. The year: 1910, or thereabouts. The scene: a gloomy drawing room in a large country house, through whose windows the audience is able to see the reason for the murk in the form of a veritable forest of dark and brooding conifers. The cast comprises three main characters: a celebrated writer with white hair, an unusually big head and a beaky nose; his elderly wife, whose clothes, like her manner, are eccentric; and a much younger woman, a companion and typist whose careful warmth barely covers the ruthlessness beneath. Minor characters include a devoted housemaid with a doll-like face, and two grand, male literary visitors, whose bitchy gossip about the household will one day be preserved for all posterity. I would call it Max Gate , which is the name of the house Thomas Hardy (our famous writer) designed and built in 1885, living there until his death in 1928. In 1910, the atmosphere inside this brick villa was intense and peculiar. Hardy and his wife, Emma, were by now deeply unhappy, a state they’d endured at least since the publication of his last great novel, Jude the Obscure , in 1895; secreted in an attic, Emma was busy writing the diaries that would provoke such guilt in Hardy once she was dead, an account of his badness as a husband. Whether this badness encompassed the fact that he’d recently fallen for yet another younger woman, our typist Florence Dugdale, is moot: rather cleverly, Florence had befriended Emma, which had given Hardy licence to install her in Max Gate as his secretary. But either way, the mood was pretty extraordinary. In 1912, by which time Florence had departed for a period after a terrible marital row, Edmund Gosse and AC Benson (my cast list’s literary figures) came to visit. By their telling, Hardy was […]
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