Robust women: mothers, sisters, wives, muses

by Paula Byrne

William Collins 2024

At a time when the emphasis on female voices is of great importance, Robust womenthat came out this year promises just that. With this unconventional biography of the Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (famous for his vividly drawn female heroines such as Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Bathsheba Everdene in Far away from the hustle and bustle), Byrne attempts to rewrite the story of Hardy’s life from the perspective of the women he knew, both real and fictional. In doing so, he comes closer to the emotional world of the man who, in old age, was gripped by anxiety about how posterity would receive him, and who did so much to throw dust in the eyes of future historians and obscure the identities of his many muses.

Byrne uncovers, through careful and masterful detective work, the obscure parts of his lifelong (invariably erotic) fascination with women. She identifies the names and places, traces Hardy’s romantic affairs over the course of his life, and illuminates in encyclopedic detail their connection to the poems and novels he wrote during six decades of tireless work in which he broke hearts and was broken himself.

Byrne anticipates those who ask why yet another biography of this already celebrated figure needs to be written. In the prologue, we are helpfully informed that the discovery of new correspondence between Hardy and his second wife Florence has aided the author’s research efforts. As Byrne says, “There are many excellent biographies of Thomas Hardy, ranging from cradle to grave. We do not need another.”

Instead, the book looks at Hardy’s life from three different angles. The first part of the book deals with the women who influenced him as a child and as a young man as he made a life for himself between London and his native Dorset. In the steps his wild and domineering mother Jemima, a maid whose fear of her low birth and her ambition to overcome her plebeian origins were passed on to her son along with her superstitions; his grandmother Mary, whose stories of life in her native Dorset during the Napoleonic Wars were to inspire Hardy’s historical novel; The Trumpet Major and his verse drama The Dynasts; his romantic entanglements with his Sparks cousins ​​(especially Tryphena, to whom he was briefly engaged); the local landlady Julia Martin, who took the boy Hardy under her wing, supervised his education, and precipitated a premature sexual awakening; his affairs with Eliza Nicholls and her sister Jane; and at least two other women to whom he was unsuccessfully engaged, Mary Waight and Cassie Pole.

In this section of the book, Hardy herself occasionally gets lost in the sheer number of people with whom Byrne peoples her narrative. An entire chapter on the mother of his close friend Horace Moule, whose influence on Hardy seems, on the evidence, to have been largely indirect, points to a (by no means serious) flaw in the execution of the work: that the biographer is too willing to give away too much of her research.

It particularly stands out in the second half, which deals with Hardy’s relationships with the women he created in his works, and the lingering influence of those old loves he never got over, not least his estranged first wife Emma, ​​whose death unleashed a wave of grief and regret that fed into some of the greatest love poems ever written in the language, much to the chagrin of his second wife Florence. Byrne’s summaries of the novels and her analysis of the characters are impeccable, and are backed up by well-judged extracts from the works in question (already well known to Hardy fans), while her analysis of the poems is deeply insightful and a useful supplement to reading the poems themselves. One minor source of irritation is that she often fails to use quotation marks when discussing the novels, making it unclear whether she is simply summarising or quoting Hardy’s narrator verbatim.

There is something darkly voyeuristic about the reading experience, as we are drawn into parts of Hardy’s life that he tried desperately to hide from prying eyes. One senses that this would be wrong, but with a guide as sensitive and empathetic as Byrne, these fears are quickly allayed. The book is informative without being salacious, and sympathetic without being hagiographic, treating both Hardy and the women with whom he was emotionally attached respectfully. This is not for the layperson who has never read a word by Hardy, but for the Hardy lover who wants to learn more about what lies behind the man and his works, Byrne’s book is essential reading.

Aaron Kyereh-Mireku is a writer and critic based in London..