Florence Emily Hardy was, in many ways, the complete antithesis of Emma, and in consequence, the changes which she brought about to Hardy’s life were truly remarkable. Unlike Emma, Florence was a modest person, as her letter of 24 October 1915 to Rebekah Owen illustrates. ‘I am not tall enough for it or graceful enough,’she says, of a hat which she has purchased in London’s Regent Street, and which she therefore offers to Rebekah. ‘The brim is lined with shell pink which does not suit my sallow complexion.’ And referring to some photographs of herself, which she had had taken, she tells Rebekah: ‘After considering them long and earnestly I am bound to confess that I have no claims at all to anything approaching good looks.’1
While Emma was alive, Florence’s relationship with her was outwardly cordial. For example, when she wrote to Emma in July 1910 from her home at Enfield, Middlesex, Florence said: ‘I am truly grieved to learn how sadly you have been [with a cough]. I trust that you are recovering strength in the country air. I cannot find words to thank you sufficiently for all your goodness to me.’2
However, to Edward Clodd, in whom she confided, Florence, in November 1910, was able to voice her true feelings:
Mrs Hardy seems to be queerer than ever. She has just asked me whether I have noticed how extremely like Crippen Mr TH. [Hardy] is, in personal appearance. She added darkly, that she would not be surprised to find herself in the cellar one morning. All this in deadly seriousness.3
This was a reference by Emma to American physician Hawley Harvey Crippen, who had allegedly murdered his wife in the January of that year.
To Hardy’s siblings, Florence was equally cordial. ‘I wish I was back in Dorset. Hope I shall soon see you again,’ she wrote on a postcard to Katharine Hardy on 20 October 1910.4 To Mary Hardy, in August 1911, Florence sent a postcard from the seaside resort of Worthing, to say: ‘I hope you’re well. I have had a delightful fortnight here bathing once & sometimes twice a day. This card shows the house where I have been staying, & the road I cross daily in bathing dress!!’5
In December 1911 Florence informed Clodd that ‘Mr T. H., his sister & I [but evidently not Emma] had a pleasant little trip last week to Bath, Gloucester & Bristol. He is very well, & seemed quite gay.’6
Florence, in her letters, reveals just how important pets were in Hardy’s life. For example, she described to Clodd how Hardy had been ‘in the depths of despair at the death of a pet cat’, something which he described as ‘an entirely gratuitous & unlooked for blow’. The cat would be buried in the pet cemetery at Max Gate, and Hardy ‘[is] finding a melancholy pleasure in writing an appropriate inscription for “Kitsey’s” headstone,’ said Florence.7 True to form, Hardy commemorated Kitsey in a poem entitled The Roman Gravemounds, but when Florence read the line ‘But my little white cat was my only friend!’, from the penultimate verse of the poem, she was highly indignant. ‘I tell him that it is monstrous ingratitude on his part,’ she told Clodd.8 Why did his pets mean so much to Hardy? Simply because, in the absence of a wife (at least, in any meaningful sense of the word) and children, they gave him the love and companionship which he craved. In other words, Hardy’s cats and dogs were his surrogate family.
On 16 January 1913, The month after Emma’s death, Florence, in a lengthy epistle to Clodd, wrote of Hardy as follows:
His life here is lonely beyond words, & he spends his evenings in reading & re-reading voluminous diaries that Mrs H. has kept from the time of their marriage. Nothing could be worse for him. He reads the comments upon himself – bitter denunciations, beginning about 1891 & continuing until within a day or two of her death – & I think he will end by believing them.
Despite this, however, Florence did all in her power to make Hardy’s life bearable. Said she: ‘I read aloud to him every evening after dinner, until eleven o’clock & take as much care of him as I possibly can.’ And in a postscript to her letter to Clodd, she added: ‘Of course nothing could be more lonely than the life he used to lead – long evenings spent alone in his study, insult & abuse his only enlivenment. It sounds cruel to write like that, & in atrocious taste, but truth is truth, after all.’9
On 30 January 1913 Florence, writing from Enfield, told Clodd that she had received a letter that day from Hardy, who had informed her that he was ‘getting through E’s papers’, and speaking of her abuse of him, Hardy declared: ‘It was, of course, sheer hallucination in her, poor thing, & not wilfulness.’ Yet again, Hardy is protective towards Emma; but his opinion was certainly not shared by Florence. In fact, so exasperated did she become that she told Clodd: ‘I feel as if I can hardly keep back my true opinion much longer.’10
Florence was able to report to Clodd, on 7 March 1913, that Hardy ‘has been extremely well in health, & quite cheerful’. However, she was clearly exasperated by the fact that Hardy was still in denial about his disastrous marriage to Emma. Said she: ‘Today he goes to Cornwall, to St Juliot’s Rectory, where he first met his “late, espousèd saint”, forty-three years ago this very week.’11 Florence, in fact, accompanied him on this visit.
Referring to Emma’s ‘diabolical diaries’, which she had hoped had been destroyed, Florence told Clodd:
… only the other night he [Hardy] produced one from his pocket & read me a passage – written about six weeks before her death – in which she [Emma] says that her father & Mr Putman were right in their estimate of TH’s character: he is … [various oft-repeated adjectives of abuse], & ‘utterly worthless’. Of course Mr Putnam, if she means the publisher, could never have belittled Mr Hardy to her. It is in this sort of way that the diaries are so poisonous. [This is a reference to George Haven Putnam, American publisher and author, who visited Max Gate in June 1911.]12
Four days later, after she and Hardy had returned home to Max Gate, Florence described their visit to Cornwall: ‘[It] has been a very painful one to me, & I have said a dozen times I wish I had not come – What possessed me to do it!’13
Writing to Clodd again in April, Florence described how Hardy’s doctor (Edward W. Mann) had declared: ‘the state of things here, before Mrs Hardy’s death – was quite alarming, so far as T.H. was concerned. [Mann] said that the lack of attention & general discomfort must have had a serious effect sooner or later. He told this to the sisters & brother [of Hardy].’14
On 21 August 1913 Florence was able to report to Clodd that Hardy was ‘in good health, & wonderfully cheerful. He has had no fit of depression for quite a long time.’15
Florence was at the end of her tether by December, on account of the presence at Max Gate of Emma’s niece, Lilian Gifford, whose manner she found to be obnoxious, and whose presence she found to be intolerable. Said she:
We had an awful scene. I have only seen a similar one when Mrs Hardy was alive. My poor sister [Florence’s younger sister Constance] could hardly keep from bursting into tears. This woman [Lilian] insulted her, in fact, behaved like a mad-woman. Of course, her [Lilian’s] brother is an imbecile – one of them at least – and an uncle died in an asylum, and her grandfather was mad at times, so I ought to be profoundly sorry for her – but I can’t be that.
The ‘brother’ to whom Florence refers in the above letter could only have been Emma’s nephew, Warren Randolph Gifford (about whom little is known – Warren evidently preferred to use his middle name, Randolph; his youngest brother Randolph Gifford having died in infancy). The ‘uncle’ was Emma’s brother, Richard Ireland Gifford, and the ‘grandfather’ was Emma’s father, John Attersoll Gifford. (In this, some have accused Florence of exaggeration, or have even gone so far as to imply that she was not telling the truth.16 In fact, Florence was a thoroughly reliable witness in this respect, as has already been demonstrated.) Continued Florence, dryly: ‘Mr Hardy had more than 20 years of insults, and apparently enjoyed them very much – according to what he says now. I don’t enjoy them [from Lilian] now.’17
On 1 January 1914 Florence told Clodd that she had given Hardy an ultimatum, that ‘if the niece is to remain here permanently, as one of the family … [I will] return to my own home, & remain there’.18
Florence wrote to Lady Hoare in July to say: ‘I am so delighted & proud to know that you are fond of him [Hardy]. I think he really needs affection & tenderness more than anyone I know – life has dealt him some cruel blows. I am sure my husband’s sisters would be very very delighted to see you.’ In other words, Florence, unlike Hardy’s late wife Emma, was more than willing to welcome her husband’s relatives and friends to Max Gate.19
On the first day of December 1914, Florence confided to Rebekah Owen: ‘You would hardly believe – but sometimes I, too, feel that awful loneliness – the feeling that there is no one much in the world who cares whether I be happy or sad. It is of all feelings the worst.’20 A few days later Florence told Rebekah, having read Hardy’s poem Wessex Heights (from his Satires of Circumstance collection): ‘It wrung my heart. It made me miserable to think that he had ever suffered so much. It was written in ’96, before I knew him.’ And, referring to Hardy’s poems in general, Florence declared:
He tells me that he has written no despondent poem for the last eighteen months, & yet I cannot get rid of the feeling that the man who wrote some of those poems is utterly weary of life – & cares for nothing in this world. If I had been a different sort of woman, & better fitted to be his wife – would he, I wonder, have published that volume? [Satires of Circumstance, published in the previous month of November].21
In late 1914 Lady Hoare evidently wrote to Florence, singling out two of Hardy’s poems –The Death of Regret and Wessex Heights (both from the Satires of Circumstance collection) – which she used to illustrate her argument that, in Florence’s words, ‘one must not make the man responsible for what the poet writes’.22 In other words, Lady Hoare was making a distinction between Hardy ‘the man’ and Hardy ‘the poet’. Lady Hoare was undoubtedly hoping that her words would comfort and reassure Florence, which they did. However, in her analysis of the situation she was mistaken, for in this case, Hardy the man and Hardy the poet were one and the same.
Florence had already indicated to Lady Hoare, in a previous letter dated 6 December 1914, that in the poem Wessex Heights, the four women referred to by Hardy were all ‘actual women’, though only three were still alive in 1896 when the poem was written. And, of course, one of these women was Emma.
The sixth and seventh (final) verses of Wessex Heights read as follows:
As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers,
I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me that she prefers;
Yet my love for her in its fullness she herself even did not know;
Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go.
So I am found on Ingpen Beacon, or on Wylls-Neck to the west,
Or else on homely Bulbarrow, or little Pilsdon Crest,
Where men have never cared to haunt, nor women have walked with me,
And ghosts then keep their distance; and I know some liberty.
Much as Hardy would have liked to believe the sentiments expressed by him in these two verses, the reality was that he never succeeded in ‘letting Emma go’, even after her death; nor did he ever manage to rid himself entirely of the ghosts that haunted him in respect of her. Likewise, although in The Death of Regret Hardy is ostensibly writing about a person who has lost a male comrade, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this poem is also about Emma; and in its final verse Hardy is again trying to convince himself that he can live contentedly without her:
And ah, seldom now do I ponder
At the window as heretofore
On the long valued one who died yonder,
And wastes by the sycamore.
To Lady Hoare, Florence expressed her feelings of tenderness for Hardy. She sometimes felt towards her husband, she said, ‘as a mother towards a child with whom things have somehow gone wrong – a child who needs comforting – to be treated gently & with all the love possible’.23
On 3 December 1915 Florence told Rebekah Owen that, to her ‘great dismay’, Hardy had reverted to his former self. ‘Tom … says he feels that he never wants to go anywhere or see anyone again. He wants to live on here [at Max Gate], quite quietly, shut up in his study.’24 In January 1916 Florence, again in a letter to Rebekah Owen, referred to ‘the awful diary the first Mrs T.H. kept (which he burned) full of venom, hatred & abuse of him & his family’.25
On 9 December 1916 Florence described a visit to St Juliot rectory, where she and Hardy ‘had tea … with the very nice Rector [the Revd John H. Dickinson] & his sister’. She also described exploring King Arthur’s castle where the couple ‘lay for an hour or so, on the grass, in the sunshine, with sheep nibbling around us, & no other living thing – while cliffs & greenyblue sea & white surf seemed hundreds of feet below’. In other words, unlike on the first occasion, Florence appears to have enjoyed her visit to Cornwall this time.26