16. Walter Gifford to Emma Hardy, 7 Sept. 1898, DCM, H.6286.
17. Walter Gifford to Emma Hardy, 24 Oct. 1898, DCM, H.6288.
18. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 27 Dec. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 18.
19. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 16 Jan. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 75: ‘voluminous diaries that Mrs H has kept from the time of their marriage… bitter denunciations beginning about 1891 & continuing until within a day or two of her death’.
20. Hardy noted their attendance in the Bible Emma gave him in 1899, marking their initials against the text from Jeremiah read by the Canon of Salisbury on this occasion. The Older TH, 97.
21. TH to Winifred Thomson, 31 Oct. 1897, Letters, II, 181.
22. TH to Thackeray Turner, 12 Oct. 1897, Letters, II, 179.
23. TH told Henry Nevinson in 1906 about the Kipling episode, Interviews and Recollections, 79.
24. See Chapter 15, p. 232.
25. The Well-Beloved, Part I, Chapter 2.
26. The epigraph, ‘one shape of many names’, is taken from Shelley’s The Revolt of Islam.
27. The Well-Beloved, Part II, Chapter 1.
28. ibid., Part III, Chapter 2.
29. ibid., Part II, Chapter 3.
30. Emma Hardy to Elspeth Grahame, 20 Aug. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 15–16.
31. The Grahames’ only child, a son, was an unhappy boy who committed suicide at Oxford – an awful echo of Little Father Time and ‘the coming will not to live’.
32. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 24 Apr. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 19.
33. Emma’s MS plan for a story, dated 1900, is in the DCM, H.6216. Hardy’s poem was published in the Tatler in July 1901 and in Poems of the Past and the Present, also 1901, and included in Selected Poems of 1916, chosen by himself as one of his favourites.
34. TH to Florence Henniker, 25 Feb. 1900, Letters, II, 248.
35. Hardy told Mrs Henniker in a letter 25 Feb. 1900, Letters, II, 248.
36. Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 27 Dec. 1899, Letters of E & F Hardy, 19.
37. First printed in Literature, 25 Nov. 1899, 513, with a note added to the title: ‘One of the Drummers killed was a native of a village near Casterbridge.’ It then appeared in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901. Later, Hardy changed the name of the poem to ‘Drummer Hodge’. The idea may have helped to inspire Rupert Brooke’s famous sonnet: ‘If I should die, think only this of me, / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England.’
38. Bertha Newcombe to Mrs Edmund Gosse, 5 Mar. 1900, cited in Emma Hardy Diaries, ed. Richard H. Taylor (1985), 10, and Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Hardy (1979), 183, from Brotherton Library Collection, Leeds.
39. He did not publish it until 1925, in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles, dating it ‘about 1900’.
40. TH to Emma Hardy, 11 Dec. 1900 and 23 Dec. 1900, Letters, II, 276, 270.
41. When printed in Poems of the Past and the Present in 1901.
42. Barbara Hardy makes the connection in her Thomas Hardy (2001), 200.
19. CAT, BIRD, EAGLE, SPHINX
1. TH to Edward Clodd, fragment of letter, May 1902, Letters, III, 20.
2. Figures taken from Michael Millgate’s article on Macmillan & Co. in The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy (2000), 250.
3. Hardy told Henry Nevinson about the young women who wrote to him asking for advice on settling in Wessex. Interviews and Recollections, 77–8.
4. Published by Harper Brothers in London in the autumn of 1898, and in New York in 1899.
5. See above, Chapter 5, pp. 81–2.
6. See above, Chapter 17, pp. 247–9.
7. See above, Chapter 17, p. 253.
8. From Gosse’s Portraits from Life, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 109.
9. Wells’s remark was reported by many, among them R. E. Zachrisson, the Swedish writer, who visited Max Gate in 1920 and thought Wells’s description reasonable, but insisted on Hardy’s ‘wonderful light blue eyes’. Cited in Interviews and Recollections, 132.
10. Archer’s interview was printed in the Pall Mall Magazine in Apr. 1901, reprinted in his Real Conversations (1904).
11. From Desmond MacCarthy’s Memories (1953).
12. William Rothenstein visited Hardy in 1897; his remarks are in Men and Memories: Recollections 1872–1938, given in Interviews and Recollections, 53–4.
13. Frank Hedgcock in 1910, struck by Hardy’s ‘simplicity and modesty’. ‘The great dome-like forehead spoke of power and his eyes, though tired, were dreamy and imaginative. His nose, which seemed slightly bent, was beak-like.’ ‘Reminiscences of Thomas Hardy’ in National and English Review, Oct. and Nov. 1951, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 91.
14. Winifred Fortescue, There’s Rosemary… There’s Rue (1939). This was in 1908. Keeping up the bird imagery, in 1926 another visitor, Virginia Woolf, likened him to a pouter pigeon.
15. Diary of Arthur Benson for 30 Apr. 1904, Magdalene College, Cambridge. If Benson heard Hardy’s remark about joining the Catholic Church correctly, it casts a new light on his London years and his friendship with Moule, whose interest in Newman and Roman Catholicism he mentions in the Life – but with no suggestion that he shared it at any point. It is an intriguing piece of information, but hung on a slender thread.
16. Details of Hardy’s visit from Martin Ray’s ‘Thomas Hardy in Aberdeen’, Aberdeen University Review, 56 (1995), 58–69. This was kindly brought to my attention by Myrrdin Jones.
17. TH to Florence Henniker, 2 June 1901, Letters, II, 288; TH to George Douglas, 3 Apr. 1901, Letters, II, 282; and Emma Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 4 Apr. 1901, Letters of E&H Hardy, 23.
18. According to Christine Wood Homer in Thomas Hardy and His Two Wives (1964), 48.
19. Described in a passage written into the Life, Chapter 26, by Florence Hardy on the advice of J. M. Barrie, who had the details from Hardy.
20. Lillie May Farris, granddaughter of Jemima’s brother William. ‘Memoirs of the Hardy and Hand Families’, Hardyana (1968–73), 65.
21. TH to Edward Clodd, 12 Apr. 1904, Letters, III, 119.
22. First published in 1909 in Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses.
23. Hardy quotes this entry from her diary in the Life, Chapter 28.
24. Cited in Interviews and Recollections, 108, from an undated text by Gosse given in Ann Thwaite’s edition of Portraits from Life (1991).
25. Jacques Blanche, Mes Modèles (1928), 84.
26. TH to Edward Clodd, 1 May 1909, Letters, IV, 21.
27. The letter is so well written and coherent that Michael Millgate has suggested that it was ‘polished’ at the Nation. Letters of E & F Hardy, p. xii.
28. Life, Chapter 1.
29. The Dynasts, Part III, Act VI, Scene viii. Hardy’s tramps over the field of Waterloo had stirred his imagination, and, as it turned out, he was predicting what would happen all over northern France in the coming war of 1914–18.
30. The Dynasts, Part III, Act I, Scene i.
31. Beerbohm was reviewing Part I only, in the Saturday Review, 30 Jan. 1904.
32. Harold Child in the TLS, 27 Feb. 1908, and unsigned review in Edinburgh Review, Apr. 1908.
33. I see that my own copy was bought in 1953 from Blackwell’s in Oxford for 8/6d. It is the 1910 first complete edition but bears no signs of having belonged to a previous owner.
34. This striking tribute is told in Interviews and Recollections, 181–2.
Part Four 1905–1928
20. CONVERGENCE
1. TH to Florence Dugdale, 10 Aug. 1905, Letters, III, 179.
2. Florence Dugdale to Rebekah Owen, 1 Dec. 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 101–2.
3. This is what she told R. L. Purdy in 1935 – see Biography Revisited, 409–10.
4. Michael Millgate gives these various accounts in his Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (1971), 446–7. In his Biography Revisited he settles for the version she gave Purdy, about visiting with Mrs Henni
ker, which seems wholly implausible.
5. From Dorothy Meech’s monograph Memories of Mr and Mrs Thomas Hardy (Beaminster, 1963). Dorothy Meech did typing work over a period of time at Max Gate for Florence Hardy after Hardy’s death. She liked her, and they often talked together. It must be remembered that such accounts, made over thirty years after the conversations described, are not necessarily accurate. It seems unlikely, for example, that Florence would have said she met the Hardys on holiday in Wareham. The point about this account is to convey that her friendship with Emma began at the same time as that with Hardy. All this information on p. 5 of the monograph.
6. ‘After the Visit’ was first printed in the Spectator, 13 Aug. 1910. It was then included in Satires of Circumstance, Lyrics and Reveries (1914) after Emma’s death, with the additional ‘(To F.E.D.)’ under the title.
7. Dorothy Meech, Memories of Mr and Mrs Thomas Hardy, 5. Even given Hardy’s reluctance to spend money, this is hard to believe.
8. TH to Reginald Smith, 26 Sept. 1907, Letters, III, 274.
9. For instance, he thanked her for a box at the Court Theatre, saying his wife could not be there, but he would bring ‘a young cousin’ – meaning Florence. TH to Lady Gregory, 7 June 1910, Letters, IV, 95.
10. According to Edward Clodd’s diary, 5 July 1909, cited in Biography Revisited, 424.
11. Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy (1979), 46.
12. Edward Clodd to Clement Shorter, 27 Aug. 1909, cited in ibid., 50.
13. The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Hardy (2000), 416.
14. This was also in 1909. Netta Syrett, The Sheltering Tree, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 86.
15. From TH’s contribution to the symposium ‘How Shall We Solve the Divorce Problem?’ in Nash’s Magazine, 5 Mar. 1912, cited in Thomas Hardy’s Public Voice, ed. Michael Millgate (2001), 332.
16. TH to Austin Harrison, 9 May 1910, Letters, IV, 87.
17. TH to Agnes Grove, 13 May 1910, Letters, IV, 89.
18. Emma Handy to Lady Hoare, 24 Apr. 1910, Letters of E & F Hardy, 48.
19. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 11 Nov. 1910, ibid., 66.
20. See Florence’s letters to Edward Clodd, 8 and 19 Nov. 1910, ibid., 65, 68. The amateur theatrical group became ‘The Hardy Players’ and caused much distress to Florence later; see Chapter 23, below.
21. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 19 Nov. 1910, ibid., 68.
22. Florence Dugdale to Sydney Cockerell, 25 Dec. 1925, ibid., 234.
23. As Pamela Dalziel demonstrates in Thomas Hardy: The Excluded and Collaborative Stories (1992), 336–55.
24. TH to Florence Henniker, 3 May 1911, Letters, IV, 150.
25. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 11 Dec. 1911, cited by Robert Gitting and Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy, 64.
26. So he told Sassoon in 1921. Siegfried Sassoon’s diary for 22 Feb., quoted in Interviews and Recollections, 128.
27. Donald Davie, Thomas Hardy and British Poetry (1973), 17.
28. The Titanic sank on 15 Apr. 1912 and Hardy’s poem was completed and first printed on 24 Apr. in a programme for a Covent Garden matinée in aid of a disaster fund. A final version was printed in Satires of Circumstance in 1914.
29. From The Later Life and Letters of Sir Henry Newbolt, cited in Interviews and Recollections, 99–100.
30. TH to Arthur Benson, 30 July 1892, Letters, I, 280.
31. Benson’s diary for Saturday, 22 Apr. 1905, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
32. Benson’s diary for Thursday, 5 Sept. 1912, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
33. Life, Chapter 31.
34. Both poems are in MS, held at the Berg Collection. The first poem is MS 64B7402 and is signed ‘E. L. Hardy’ and dated Max Gate, 22 Nov. 1912. The second is MS 64B7433, with pencilled words by Hardy, ‘Written by Mrs (Emma) Hardy 22 Nov. 1912: 5 days before her death’.
35. Rebekah Owen to a Mrs Fauty, presumably her housekeeper in the Lake District, 28 Nov. 1912, quoted in Carl Weber’s Thomas Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (1952), 162–4. Owen was quite capable of questioning servants to extract information.
36. Dr Alan Frizzell writes, ‘Impacted gallstones could produce a fatal outcome, but I would not expect the pain of gallstones to be felt in the back. Mrs Hardy may have had gallstones, but I doubt if she died of them. The back pain suggests a retroperitoneal problem, and the course of her final illness is typical of a leaking abdominal aortic aneurysm. In the course of my career I came across more than one unfortunate patient who went to bed with the observation “My back is bad tonight”, to be found expired the next day from that cause.’
21. SATIRES OF CIRCUMSTANCE
1. Mary Hardy to Mr and Mrs Hull [28 Nov. 1912?], DCM, H.1987.227.
2. Rebekah Owen to Mrs Fauty [n.d.], cited in Carl Weber, Thomas Hardy and the Lady from Madison Square (1952), 165.
3. Reported in the Dorset County Chronicle, 5 Dec. 1912.
4. See Florence Hardy’s letter to Lady Hoare, 22 July 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 98.
5. So Robert Gittings and Jo Manton allege in The Second Mrs Hardy (1979), 79. They also say on p. 93 that Jane Riggs stayed until 1917, when Florence alienated her further by taking cooking lessons herself.
6. So Florence reported to Edward Clodd in a letter of 30 Jan. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 77.
7. Mary Hardy to Nat Sparks, 15 Feb. 1913, Sparks Archive, Hardy Collection, Eton College.
8. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, Max Gate, 7 Mar. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 78–9.
9. The volume of stories was A Changed Man and Other Tales, published 24 Oct. 1913 and simultaneously by Harper’s in the US.
10. TH to Edward Elgar, 28 July 1913, Letters, IV, 291.
11. TH to Edward Clodd, 10 Dec. 1913, ibid., 327–8.
12. First printed in Moments of Vision and Miscellaneous Verses (1917), where it is dated Aug. 1913.
13. ‘When Oats Were Reaped’ is also dated Aug. 1913, but Hardy did not print it until 1925, in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles.
14. TH to Florence Henniker, 21 Dec. 1913, Letters, IV, 330.
15. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 3 Dec. 1913, Letters of E & F Hardy, 87.
16. In the Life Hardy describes this period in these words: ‘The autumn glided on… In the muddle of Hardy’s unmistressed housekeeping, animal pets of his late wife died, strayed, or were killed, much to Hardy’s regret.’
17. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 1 Jan. 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 92.
18. Florence Dugdale to Edward Clodd, 3 Dec. 1913, Letters E & F Hardy, 86. The ‘imbecile’ must be Randolph, mentioned in Walter Gifford’s letters to Emma.
19. See Wilfrid Blunt’s Cockerell (1964), 214.
20. Florence Dugdale to Rebekah Owen, 18 Jan. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 114.
21. Florence Hardy to Rebekah Owen, 20 Sept. 1915, cited by Robert Gittings and Jo Manton, The Second Mrs Hardy, 72.
22. TH to Sydney Cockerell, 11 Feb. 1914, Letters, V, 9; TH to Edward Clodd, 11 Feb. 1914, Letters, V, 9.
23. Hardy told Edmund Blunden that he was capable of sexual intercourse until he was eighty-four, i.e., until 1924, ten years after he married Florence. This was told by Blunden to Martin Seymour-Smith, who gives it in his Hardy (1994), 728. Florence would certainly have understood that the duty of a wife was to submit to her husband’s embraces, but there is nothing to suggest that she took any pleasure in them, and a good deal to suggest she did not – her depression and hypochondria and her perpetual longing to get away from Max Gate.
24. Diary of Arthur Benson, Friday, 8 May 1914, Magdalene College, Cambridge.
25. TH to Sydney Cockerell, 9 Aug. 1914, Letters, V, 41.
26. TH to Florence Henniker, 17 July 1914, Letters, V, 37.
27. TH to Maurice Macmillan, 6 Aug. 1913, Letters, IV, 293.
28. TH to George Macmillan, 10 Aug. 1914, Letters, V, 41, and TH to Sydney Cockerell, 28 Aug. 1914, Letters, V, 45.
&nbs
p; 29. Florence Dugdale to Lady Hoare, 6 Dec. 1914, Letters of E & F Hardy, 104.
30. TH to Florence Henniker, 23 Dec. 1914, Letters, V, 70.
31. Virginia Woolf to TH, 17 Jan. 1915, The Letters of Virginia Woolf, II (1976), 58. On 23 Feb. she became ill and was out of action throughout the summer.
32. ‘Books in General’, New Statesman, 4 Nov. 1916. Squire wrote under his pseudonym ‘Solomon Eagle’. A week later Robert Lynd attacked the poems in the Nation for being ugly, prosaic and exaggerated.
33. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 12 Aug. 1916, Letters of E & F Hardy, 118.
34. ‘To Shakespeare’, one of the few poems that had already appeared in print, first in A Book of Homage to Shakespeare edited by Israel Gollancz for the 300th anniversary of his death, then in the Fortnightly Review for June 1916. Florence Hardy then printed it as a separate pamphlet with the help of Sydney Cockerell in July 1916.
35. The apparently random order of the poems is mysterious. Hardy must have realized that such personal work would be scanned for what it tells about his life, and that jumbling would not prevent this. Indeed he says himself in a letter of early Nov. 1919, ‘there is more autobiography in a hundred lines of Mr Hardy’s poetry than in all the novels.’ This is from a draft in Florence Hardy’s hand, to Archie Whitfield, a critic who had suggested that Jude might be autobiographical. Letters, VII, 161. So, given that he did put the ‘Poems of 1912–13’ and his war poems into clear, separate sections, why did he not arrange other poems by subject, or put them in chronological order? I am unable to suggest any explanation.
36. Florence Hardy to Sydney Cockerell, 8 Dec. 1917, cited in Biography Revisited, 474, Yale.
37. These are discussed in Chapter 11, above.
38. From an edited version of a Radio 4 conversation between Vernon Scannell and Philip Larkin, printed in the Listener as ‘A Man who Noted Things’, 25 July 1968.
39. A letter from Florence Hardy to Marie Stopes in Sept. 1923 reads: ‘I find on talking to him [Hardy] that the idea of my having a child at his age fills him with terror… He said he would have welcomed a child when we married first, ten years ago, but now it would kill him with anxiety to have to father one.’
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