Hardy Women

Starred review from October 15, 2024
Hardy's women, real and imaginary. The prolific novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was famous for creating indelible female characters, displaying a rare insight into women's experiences. As British biographer Byrne reveals in a close look at the women in his world, those insights did not translate into real life. He was a fickle suitor, easily disenchanted, and a neglectful spouse whose first wife "poured out her frustration" in bitter diaries titled "What I Think of My Husband." His second wife also grew disillusioned with a man whose deepest love, she realized, was Tess of the D'Urbervilles, a woman he invented. Beginning with the midwife who delivered him, Byrne devotes pithy chapters to some 40 women: Hardy's strong-willed mother, his grandmothers, sisters, aunts, and female cousins; girls he had boyhood crushes on and those he fell "madly in love" with later. Byrne conveys a palpable sense of working-class women's lives in Victorian Britain: many suffered domestic abuse at the hands of their drunken, dissolute husbands; multiple pregnancies undermined their health; poverty stalked them; disease killed them and their children. They had few chances to live fulfilling, independent lives. Even Hardy's beloved sister Mary, who became a schoolmistress, endured a circumscribed, lonely existence. Besides examining women's interactions with Hardy, Byrne illuminates Hardy's major novels from the point of view of his complex female characters and, in the biography's final section, focuses on his two wives and his intense infatuation with a young actress set to play his beloved Tess on stage. Drawing on Hardy's voluminous correspondence, memoirs (including his self-ghosted biography), and recently discovered letters from his second wife, Byrne reveals an insecure man who feared physical contact and whose romantic involvements fell into a recurring pattern: obsession, rejection, and fuel for his imagination. An acutely sensitive portrait.

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