Hardy never wrote or spoke about his wedding to Emma. There is a short, serene account of the day by Emma in her Recollections, written some thirty-five years afterwards. ‘The day we were married was a perfect September day – the 17th, 1874 – not brilliant sunshine, but wearing a soft, sunny luminousness; just as it should be.’ Nothing more. At the time she wrote even less in her diary:
Married September 17th. 1874
St Peter’s Paddington from 54 Chippenham Rd. Westbourne Pk1
St Peter’s Church was newly built and ugly, and must have been picked purely for its convenience, Elgin Avenue being within easy walking distance of Walter Gifford’s house in Chippenham Road.2 Canon Gifford’s letter suggests that the ceremony took place in the morning. Emma was given away by her brother. The marriage certificate shows that Hardy’s witness was the daughter of his landlady. Either he could find no friend or family, or he preferred not to ask any, out of shyness, or wanting to protect Emma. He put down his own and his father’s occupations plainly as ‘Author’ and ‘Builder’.
A line in Emma’s diary has been scored over but seems to read ‘Palace Hotel, Queen’s Road’, which could be where the small party had lunch, and almost certainly where she and Hardy spent their first night together before going on to Brighton.3 The next entry is ‘Brighton. Rough sea on Friday’. At Morton’s Hotel in Brighton, Hardy wrote to his brother:
Dear Henry, I write a line to tell you all at home that the wedding took place yesterday, and that we are got as far as this on our way to Normandy and Paris. There were only Emma and I, her uncle who married us, and her brother, my landlady’s daughter signed the book as one witness.
I am going to Paris for materials for my next story. Shall return the beginning of October… We sent an advertisement of the marriage to the Dorset Chronicle – Try to see it. Yours in haste / Tom.
Thanks for your good wishes.4
Hardy was never a florid letter writer, and this sticks to the barest facts, suggesting that Henry was at this point the only member of the family he felt inclined to write to.
If there was a celebratory lunch, if Emma looked beautiful with the soft, sunny light on her wedding dress, if she even wore a special dress, these things went unrecorded. Their happiness at being together at last after four and a half years of being in love and apart must be assumed. No need for a party, dancing, music, food and drink, neighbours, jokes, flowers, families. Yet weddings are not easy to negotiate without festivities of some kind, and Hardy, given a little encouragement, took pleasure in parties. The fact that when he came to write about his early love for Emma, calling up so many detailed memories in so many poems, he had nothing to say of either the wedding or the honeymoon makes you wonder whether the wedding seemed to him more like a necessary adjustment made to their circumstances than like the fulfilment of a dream, and whether the wedding trip was less full of tenderness and pleasure than he had hoped. Temperamentally, he was given to self-doubt after achieving long-cherished ambitions. It happened when he finished building his house, Max Gate, and was plunged into anxiety that he had done the wrong thing, and his wedding may have produced the same sort of reaction. Weddings demand buoyant spirits. Hardy was an anxious man and easily cast down. Away from Cornwall and buttressed by her clergyman uncle, Emma seemed less of a free spirit. His London acquaintance with the Stephens and their clever circle had by his own confession given a slight shake to his attachment to her, and she must have felt it. Whether both of them, having defied their parents, had regretful thoughts for them on the day, and whether lovemaking, at last licensed, was awkward for them, as for most newly married innocents, we shall never know, but there were many possible reasons for them to feel unsure of themselves. Yet they were doing what they had both dreamt of for four years and what he had worked for with unremitting dedication. Some sense of triumph and relief must have been in the air during their simple ceremony.
Emma’s diary is a record of their travels, not of her feelings, and ‘Tom’ makes few appearances in it. They spent the weekend in Brighton, where, she notes, they visited the Aquarium and the Pavilion, and went out on to the old pier. On Sunday they went twice to church, rather surprisingly, and back to the Aquarium for more observation of turtles and seals. A cheerful note comes in with Paris in prospect: ‘Brighton’s Sunday is like a Parisian Sunday. All enjoyment gaiety and bands of music and excursionists.’ On Monday ‘Tom bathed’ in spite of the rough sea; and in the evening they left for their Channel steamer and a choppy crossing to Dieppe. Once in Rouen she is in her element, describing the hotel, many details of the French dinner, among them ‘Little pigeons delicate to a degree and salad eaten with it’; and the bedroom, ‘night dresses laid out on bed… 2 large square pillows. Spring mattresses’, and, as they sat writing, the chambermaid coming into their room in her white cotton jacket and short petticoats, smiling and chattering, and bearing a pail to go under the washstand.
Her delight in the trip grew as they reached Paris: ‘Place de la Concorde first seen by moonlight!… Stars quite put out by Parisian lamps.’ It was only three years since the Franco-Prussian War and the violence of the Commune, and they saw the half-destroyed Tuileries (‘tells what a French mob can effect’). Otherwise tourist Paris was in good order, and they took trains to Versailles and Saint-Cloud, saw the Louvre and Notre-Dame, the Hôtel de Cluny, Napoleon’s tomb and the morgue, so popular with Victorian visitors: ‘Three bodies – middle one pink – Their clothes hanging above them. Not offensive but repulsive.’ She was quick to notice children, cats also, the clothes and the flower shops, and she thought the working-class people of Paris very small, ‘pigmies in fact’, and the old women ‘very ugly and dark – very fierce in the poorest streets’.
She also noticed that
Wherever I go, whoever I pass… the people gaze at me as much or more than I at them and their beautiful city… Query – Am I a strange-looking person – or merely picturesque in this hat – Women sometimes laugh a short laugh as they pass. Men stare – some stand – some look back or turn, look over their shoulders – look curiously, inquisitively – some… tenderly without my being mistaken – they do in a French manner.
As it is remarkable I note it –
Children gape too –
She does not say whether Hardy noticed people staring at her, or whether she asked him what he thought; there is nothing to suggest he teased her and they laughed about it together. He has simply disappeared from her narrative. But she loved the time spent in Paris, and on leaving on the last day of September she wrote, ‘Adieu to Paris – Charmante ville / Adieu to the Boulevards. To the gay shops – To the “ gens ” sitting in the streets To the vivants enfants To the white caps of the femmes To the river and its boats To the clear atmosphere and brilliant colourings.’
Emma was a naive diarist, responsive to what she saw and fluent in a scatter-brained way. She makes you smile, sympathetically; and she shows her enjoyment of travel, but from our point of view she fails to seize her great opportunity – she might have been honeymooning with anyone, Hardy’s presence being barely mentioned. No doubt there was an element of decorousness in this, and intimacy is hard to describe. His only surviving account of the trip is no better, written in old age and consisting of half a sentence mentioning ‘a short visit to the Continent – their first Continental days having been spent at Rouen’.5 On the train returning them to Rouen she continued to put down her impressions of Paris, remembering the white coats of the waiters on the boulevards, ‘Blossom white – wonderfully pure and clean and smoothly starched and ironed’. Then, ‘Thursday Oct – 1 – 1874 / Arrived at London – Dirty London. Very wet –’
They now had to begin their serious life together and establish themselves somewhere in England. Since neither possessed so much as a table, a chair or any household goods, they needed a furnished place. They looked in the south-west outer suburbs, Wimbledon and Denmark Hill, for cheapness, and after a few days took half a house in Surbiton, still mostly open country and farmland but with an efficient railway connection to central London. St David’s Villa was a new double-fronted house with two staircases, a cellar, a carriage drive and a garden, and they would be sharing it with a retired brewer called Hughes, a friend of someone Hardy had known in Weymouth. Hughes had a wife, a small daughter and a dog.6 There must also have been at least one servant to help out.
Emma had not been brought up to clean and cook, while Hardy had always been able to take for granted that he would be looked after by his mother or by landladies. Since during the years of their courtship they had spent only a few weeks together each year, almost always in holiday circumstances, they had a great deal to learn about each other and had to establish a domestic routine. There must have been shocks on both sides. Although Emma knew she was breaking away from her family and its traditions, her model of marriage came from her mother and her sister, both installed in their own well-appointed homes and always supported by servants. Hardy, on the other hand, had seen his grandmother and mother in charge of all the domestic activities at home, and when his mother was ill his aunt came to take over, and his sisters grew up learning household skills. Was Emma going to wash Hardy’s linen? Out of the question. She could probably put together a light meal, but cooking and serving dinner would be outside her range.
The pattern of his days had to be that he wrote, and thought about his work, in a room set aside as his study. He may have read aloud to her some of what he had written during the day and given her pages to copy. Unfortunately the theme of the book he was now embarked on, planned before the wedding, did not appeal to her: it was the story of the social rise of the intelligent child of two servants. He would have appreciated the irony of the situation in theory but perhaps not in practice. How did she fill her days while he was working? She no longer had a horse to ride. Neither ever said what happened to Fanny, but Emma must have missed riding sadly. She had no piano either, no garden of her own, and no family or friends close by or inclined to visit. She read. A note in her diary listing knitting wool and crewel thread suggests she embroidered and knitted. They went for walks, and to church, and sometimes into London on the train together to go to a gallery or shop. She gave her orders to the servant. She thought about her own writing projects.
Their good fortune was that his books were selling well. Hardy began to be aware of the scale of his success only when he noticed ladies on the London train carrying copies of the just published two-volume edition of Far from the Madding Crowd with Mudie’s Library labels on the covers. It became clear that his four years of bruising hard work had succeeded, and he was well able to keep Emma in comfort. In fact, there was no need for them to be living in Surbiton, a very modest setting for a popular writer. The winter of 1874 was cold, with snow, travelling was difficult, and there were no visits to or from families at Christmas. In the new year they decided to return to central London, and in March they moved to rooms in Newton Road, just north of Westbourne Grove and close to Emma’s brother Walter. Hardy noted that all their worldly goods at this time fitted into four small packing cases, two full of books, one of books and linen, sundries in the fourth. It was not the way respectable middle-class couples were expected to start married life in the 1870s.
Before the move George Smith had advised Hardy to ask Tinsley to sell him back the copyright of Under the Greenwood Tree. Tinsley cannily put a price of £300, ten times what he had paid (‘preposterous’ said Smith) and threw in some criticism for good measure. ‘I think your genius truer than Dickenses [sic.] ever was, but you want a monitor more than the great Novelist ever did. Apologising for being so plain spoken.’7 Hardy told Tinsley he was asking twice what he was prepared to pay, and the matter lapsed. Meanwhile the first edition of Far from the Madding Crowd sold out in January and a second was printed.8 In America Publishers Weekly talked of ‘Mr Hardy’s great novel’ and predicted it would be ‘one of the hits of the season’.9 And it was, in spite of Henry James’s savagely superior attack in the Nation: ‘imitative talent… second rate… fatal lack of magic… verbose and redundant style… little sense of proportion and almost none of composition… Everything human in the book strikes us as factious and insubstantial; the only things we believe in are the sheep and the dogs.’ Clever, and funny, but, for all James’s fine intelligence, wrong.
He was wrong because Hardy had found a true voice, sometimes awkward but tuned into experiences and feelings outside the range of Henry James. It is a voice that speaks to readers in many countries and to which successive generations have responded. With this voice Hardy established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist’s eye and country people are shown playing out their lives ‘between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change’.10 From now on all his best novels – The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure – were built on this foundation. But something wilful, or whimsical, or stubbornly resistant to producing merely what people wanted made him turn away repeatedly from what he did best. Few novelists maintain their highest standards in book after book; Thackeray, George Eliot, Henry James, even Dickens all had their failures. But Hardy’s output is exceptionally uneven. Over the next decade, the first ten years of his married life, it went like this: failure (Ethelberta), masterpiece (The Return of the Native), slight historical novel (The Trumpet-Major), failure (A Laodicean), interesting oddity (Two on a Tower), masterpiece (The Mayor of Casterbridge). To produce two masterpieces in a decade is enough for any writer. Even the two failures have their points of interest, and the second was written during a painful and prolonged illness. But the first is a very curious case, because it was written on the back of the great success of Far from the Madding Crowd and managed to dissipate almost all the goodwill, commercial and critical, it had earned.
While they were still at Surbiton, Stephen asked for a new serial for the Cornhill, and Smith wanted to sign him up for publication in volume form. They offered him £700 for the combined rights, and from America there was a further £550, the increased advances being the direct result of the success of Far from the Madding Crowd. Hardy had been planning a comedy of manners, perhaps encouraged by Anny Thackeray telling him that ‘a novelist must necessarily like society.’11 It was to be set largely in London and partly in France and called The Hand of Ethelberta. He was annoyed by the reviewers’ insistence that his gift was for rural stories, and, although he had another idea for one with a woodland setting, he put that aside and started on Ethelberta. Stephen and Smith were both disconcerted by what he told them about it, but they were committed to it, and Stephen wrote politely of his pleasure in reading the early chapters.12 But the public were disappointed in due course – it sold badly – and Ethelberta remains one of the least read of Hardy’s novels.13 You can see why. It is too long and too busily plotted, and the characters remain notional figures, there to make points. At the same time it is full of odd and arresting touches – as are all Hardy’s novels – and Ethelberta herself, quickwitted and ambitious, and with an awkward path to negotiate, is a brave attempt to show a modern woman who finds herself outside the conventional structures of society and sets out defiantly to make the most of her situation. Some critics praised its originality and element of fantasy, and one saw it as ‘a humorous fable’ and an attack on the rich, which it partly is. But it is more than that.
Hardy had imagined a young woman whose parents are servants, father a butler, mother once a children’s nurse in a county family, her aunt a maid who married a valet. Her many siblings are also all employed in lowly occupations, as cook, dressmaker, carpenter, housepainter, pupil teacher, page-boy, etc. She alone, educated well enough to become a governess in a wealthy family, has escaped from her class, first marrying the son of the house where she worked, then widowed almost as soon as married and taken abroad by her mother-in-law to have her education finished and a little polish put on. She now passes as a lady and has also become a published poet. She is beautiful, with what Hardy calls squirrelcoloured hair, and performs so effectively as an extemporizer that she can fill a London theatre. Society is at her feet, and suitors are queuing up. But, although she is ambitious for herself, she is unwilling to jettison her family and tries to lead a double life, sharing her London house with them – they pretend to be unrelated to her and merely her servants – while she makes up her mind how to proceed with her life. It was the emphasis on servants that upset Emma. Hardy called it a comedy, and some of it is farcical. It is also of course a commentary on his own position, which parallels Ethelberta’s in obvious ways, and on the English preoccupation with class. What makes a lady or a gentleman? How central this question was: Leslie Stephen, on declaring himself an unbeliever, announced, ‘I now believe in nothing… but I do not the less believe in morality… I mean to live and die like a gentleman if possible.’14
Hardy shows how uncomfortable Ethelberta sometimes finds her position. Attempting to communicate with one of her sisters, she thinks:
The wretched homeliness of Gwendoline’s mind seemed… to be absolutely intolerable, and Ethelberta was suddenly convinced that to involve Gwendoline in any… discussion would simply be increasing her own burden, and adding worse confusion to her sister’s already confused existence… As she ascended the stairs, Ethelberta ached with an added pain… It was that old sense of disloyalty to her class and kin by feeling as she felt now which caused the pain, and there was no escaping it. [my italics] Gwendoline would have gone to the ends of the earth for her: she could not confide a thought to Gwendoline!15
As you read this passage, you think at once of Hardy’s relations with his own family, parents, brother, sisters and cousins. While he was writing Ethelberta his sister Kate was working as a pupil teacher in Piddlehinton’s mixed National School and his brother Henry as a builder with their father; his cousin Martha and her husband, ex-lady’s maid and butler, were preparing to emigrate to Queensland, Australia, despairing of making a good life in England.16 So the book was among other things a farewell to Martha, and one of its most striking scenes may have come from something she told him about her working years. It describes an evening when the family are at dinner downstairs and the staff decide to come up from the basement and play games in the first-floor drawing rooms.
‘Now let’s have a game of cat-and-mice,’ said the maidservant cheerily… Away then ran the housemaid and Menlove [the lady’s maid] and the young footman started at their heels. Round the room, over the furniture, under the furniture, through the furniture, out of one window, along the balcony, in at another window, again round the room – so they glided with the swiftness of swallows and the noiselessness of ghosts. Then the housemaid drew a jew’s-harp from her pocket, and struck up a lively waltz sotto voce. The footman seized Menlove… and began spinning gently round the room with her… ‘They’ll hear you underneath, they’ll hear you, and we shall all be ruined!’ ‘Not at all,’ came from the cautious dancers. ‘These are some of the best built houses in London – double floors, filled in with material that will deaden any row you like to make…’17
The scene must have caused a stir in some London households.
The whole book is built around class encounters. Ethelberta moves through the social layers, while her older sisters end up emigrating to Australia. Her brothers remain working men, rough in their speech and appearance, and so radical in their views that one does his best to prevent Ethelberta marrying into the peerage. A London society lady gives her views on not spoiling servants by lending them books ‘of the wrong kind for their station’ and making them dissatisfied – ‘and dreadfully ambitious!’ suggests Ethelberta slyly.18 A smooth, well-connected gentleman who courts her prides himself on his nonchalance and ‘never disturbed the flesh upon his face except when he was obliged to do so’. Ethelberta rather likes him but goes off him when she finds he owes his fortune to buying up old horses for slaughter and selling horsemeat for hounds.19
A sensation is caused at a dinner when an apparently disembodied voice is heard to exclaim ‘Good God’. It turns out to be the butler, Ethelberta’s father, reacting to hearing the diners he is serving gossip about her impending marriage. His employers are shocked, first by his speaking at all, and then by the discovery that they have unknowingly entertained their butler’s daughter at this same dinner table. The mistress of the house wants to sack him at once, and his job is saved only because the master values him too highly to let him go and is prepared to excuse his lapse into human behaviour.20 When Ethelberta takes her builder brothers on an educational visit to the Royal Academy, they arrive in their best clothes, ‘chests covered with broad triangular areas of padded blue silk’, and walk through the gallery ‘with the contrite bearing of meek people in church’, admiring the construction of the skylights overhead. Dan observes, superfluously, ‘I feel that I baint upon my own ground today.’21
Ethelberta is worldly enough to opt in the end for marriage to the disreputable – but very rich – old peer who pursues her. In making her choice, she consults a treatise on Utilitarianism, and in pondering whether to tell the old man about her background she picks up another on Casuistry. This is Hardy determined to show her serious intellectual qualifications. She chooses to tell her aristocratic lover the truth, and he of course doesn’t give a damn – he knew already, and relishes it. She neither loves him nor even likes him much, but sees him as the solution to her problems and is confident she can keep him in order. Her brother Sol scolds her for ‘creeping up among the useless lumber of our nation that’ll be the first to burn if there comes a flare. I never see such a deserter of your own lot as you be… When you were a girl, you wouldn’t drop a curtsey to ’em… But, instead of sticking to such principles, you must needs push up, so as to get girls such as you were once to curtsey to you.’22 Sol need not have worried. By the end of the book the old viscount has been tamed, and his lady is running the estate and, in her spare time, working on an epic poem, inspired by her admiration for the republican poet Milton (her epic ambitions curiously predict Hardy’s composition of The Dynasts three decades later). She is also helping her family. Her parents are installed in a villa on the south coast. She gives her younger sister a dowry and enables her youngest brother – the page-boy – to go into the Church, a nice Hardy joke. Even her builder brothers Sol and Dan have acquired their own business with a loan from her and signed a contract to build a hospital for £20,000.23 Hardy passes few overt judgements, letting the story do its own work. It is a pity he packs it with too much material and too many thin sketches of people, because he has a good theme that deserves better treatment. Its failure is tantalizing, but it is a failure. Leslie Stephen should have made him work it over, cutting, sharpening and rewriting.
But Stephen had other things on his mind, and he made few suggestions beyond bowdlerizations. He asked Hardy not to describe Ethelberta’s poems as ‘amorous’ and fussed, ‘I may be over particular, but I don’t quite like the suggestion of the very close embrace in the London churchyard,’ where she is kissed by one of her admirers on a visit to Milton’s tomb.24 The two men met and talked in March 1875 but not about Hardy’s intentions for his new book. Stephen wrote to him inviting him to call alone, as late as he liked in the evening, without giving a reason.
I went, and found him alone, wandering up and down his library in slippers; his tall thin figure wrapt in a heath-coloured dressing-gown. After a few remarks on our magazine arrangements, he said he wanted me to witness his signature to what, for a moment, I thought was his will; but it turned out to be a deed renunciatory of holy orders, under the Act of 1870. He said grimly that he was really a reverend gentleman still, little as he might look it, and that he thought it as well to cut himself adrift of a calling for which, to say the least, he had always been utterly unfit. The deed was executed with due formality. Our conversation then turned upon theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, the constitution of matter, the unreality of time and kindred subjects.25
Hardy could only be flattered that Stephen should make a request so personal, trusting and friendly.
The Hardys stayed in London until July, and the two men exchanged further letters. There was, however, no invitation to them as a couple. Minny, as we have seen, did not like Hardy, and that was a good enough reason. She was also experiencing a difficult pregnancy, and Stephen took her to Switzerland in the summer. So there is no knowing what Minny would have made of Emma, whose inconsequentiality and chatter was faintly in the style of her sister Anny. In November, almost without warning, Minny died of convulsions brought on by her pregnancy. Stephen was broken with grief. Her death came on his birthday, and he never celebrated the day again. It was a ceremonious gesture of a kind Hardy understood and observed himself in the same spirit later in his own life, feeling the need to give love and death and sorrow their due.
In London, Hardy took a first cautious step as a professional author speaking up for his profession when he joined the Copyright Association and was one of a delegation to the Prime Minister, Disraeli, encouraging him to set up a Select Committee to look into the law of copyright. This was in May. In June he went house hunting in Dorset without Emma, visiting Shaftesbury, Blandford and Wimborne, all at a discreet distance from Bockhampton, although he must have taken the opportunity of dropping in on his parents. None of the houses he saw appealed, but he and Emma agreed to leave London in July in any case and make for Swanage on the Dorset coast, where he said he intended to set some scenes in Ethelberta.
On the way they stopped in Bournemouth and on St Swithin’s Day spent a rainy afternoon at a hotel. The day is sadly commemorated in his poem ‘We Sat at the Window’, published after her death with the inscription ‘(Bournemouth, 1875)’ below the title.26 They had been married for ten months, and this is his first known utterance about the state of things between them – a case of true Hardyesque irony. Far from describing the enjoyment of a trip out of town together, it is about their discontent as the rain falls and neither can find anything to like in the other. ‘We were irked by the scene, by our own selves; yes’ – and this is toned down from the manuscript’s sharper ‘We were irked by the scene, by each other, yes.’ It is a stiff, remorseful poem about a bad moment. It is also entirely theoretical, giving no impression of either as individuals. The only physical detail is the rain. He says he failed to ‘see’ her then, but he also fails to let us see her in the poem. For a poem that takes on an intensely personal moment to be so impersonal is disconcerting.
What had happened to the living, high-spirited girl in Cornwall? Hardy had killed off Elfride at the end of A Pair of Blue Eyes, and he may have begun to think that the Emma he had fallen in love with was as insubstantial as Elfride. A friend who met her a few years further into their marriage said of her, ‘Mrs Hardy belonged essentially to the class of woman gifted with spirit and the power of deciding for herself, which had attracted Hardy in his early manhood. She had the makings of a Bathsheba, with restricted opportunities.’27 Perhaps she was finding that her opportunities were as restricted within marriage as they had been before. He knew he ought to value her, just as she doubtless knew she ought to praise the chapters of Ethelberta he showed her, and failed to. When things were not going well between them, his response was to withdraw into himself. He preferred silence to quarrels, which might have cleared the air and sent them into each other’s arms.
With Hardy it is usually easier to find evidence of things going badly than accounts of happiness, but it was not all gloom. The steamer carried them on to Swanage, ‘a seaside village lying snug within two headlands as between a finger and a thumb’, with beach, boats and spectacular cliff walks with views over outlying rocks and sea, a spot likely to please Emma as much as himself. It was not yet a popular resort, and they had no difficulty finding lodgings with a retired sea captain and his wife at West End Cottage, a modest house on the hill leading out of town. Captain Masters told them sea stories and took them out in his boat; Mrs Masters looked after them. Asked about her later, Emma said she was fairly pleasant, adding that she stole from them.28 Since the Hardys possessed almost nothing, it must have been money she took. It can’t have been much, and they liked the place enough to stay there for nearly a year, until May 1876.
Swanage was near enough to Bockhampton for Hardy to make a gesture to his family. Mary and Kate were invited over for a holiday, and to meet Emma, at the beginning of September. It was the first encounter between his sisters and his wife, an anxious moment for all of them. Again the only account comes from Emma’s diary, and again it is studiously impersonal, not mentioning their presence at all on one trip, the only evidence of which comes from Mary’s sketch book. Mary was never talkative, but her brother’s love was precious to her. Years later Emma accused her of trying to make division between her and Tom from the start, but things appear to have gone well enough in Swanage, and some sort of friendship was established. Mary was well read and well spoken, and could discuss books and poetry with Emma, and Kate was cheerful and prepared to make friends. Her letters to Emma after this are affectionate, and she was eager to be invited for further visits. Hardy took them all on a day trip to the Isle of Wight aboard a steamer, past the Needles, Ventnor and Ryde and back through the Solent, stopping at Bournemouth and reaching Swanage again by moonlight. On the last day of the visit they had what Emma described as a ‘Breakfast Picnic’ at Corfe Castle, a few miles inland. It was too far to walk, and they got into ‘Sommer’s Van, leaving Swanage at 7. with 15 people’. On the road they picked up more passengers ‘until we were 21. and were packed as close as sardines’, wrote Emma in her diary, adding ‘Sun shining carelessly and lazily.’ They took a kettle and brewed their tea on the green slopes below the ruined castle, and in the afternoon Mary and Kate said goodbye and walked off along the Wareham road with their bits of luggage. Hardy and Emma returned to Swanage on the top of the horse bus, three horses abreast, with views over the lush late-summer landscape: ‘Hedges flowing over into the wide-sided roads, growing freely into the fields behind.’29 She sounds content.
They kept up a habit of walking daily on the shore or the cliffs, even when Hardy was working. The first instalment of Ethelberta, with dully conventional illustrations by George Du Maurier, had appeared in the Cornhill in July, and he kept going steadily, the last sent off in January. Whatever people thought of it, his reputation was growing. To his delight, a dialect narrative poem he had written ten years before, ‘The Bride-Night Fire’, was published in November both in the Gentleman’s Magazine and in Appleton’s Journal in America; offending words were removed (‘her cold little buzzoms’ becoming ‘her cold little figure’) and some dialect words changed, but it was still entertaining.30 Emma made a copy of the original version, which Hardy then corrected again, giving them a chance to talk about it and share it, which meant much to her. Also in November came a favourable critical article in the French fortnightly Revue des deux mondes, one of the most influential journals in Europe.
In the same month Hardy told an editor seeking a story from him that he intended ‘to suspend my writing – for domestic reasons chiefly – for a longer time than usual after finishing Ethelberta, which I am sorry to say is not nearly done yet’.31 Domestic reasons could have meant house hunting or a hope that Emma was pregnant. She had her thirty-fifth birthday at the end of November, and each month must have brought its private drama of expectation and disappointment, and anxiety about her age. Whatever his reasons, he had made up his mind to take a break from writing. In March they moved again, settling briefly in lodgings in Yeovil.32 Ethelberta appeared in volume form, and the Leipzig publisher Tauchnitz, who sold English-language novels all over Europe, approached Hardy for the first time with an offer for it, going on to publish editions of nearly all his books. Hardy started a new notebook in which he planned to collect source material. Like many nineteenth-century novelists, he saw newspapers as a useful repository of human-interest stories, and Emma was given another task of copying out likely stuff.
Money was not short, there was nothing to keep them in England, and Emma loved travelling abroad. They decided to take another foreign trip in May, this time to Brussels and the Rhine-land. Before setting off for the Continent, Hardy wrote to Leslie Stephen for advice on his reading, particularly critical books. Stephen, still stunned with sorrow, sent an admirable reply: ‘if you mean seriously to ask me what critical books I recommend, I can only say that I recommend none. I think as a critic that the less authors read of criticism the better. You, e.g., have a perfectly fresh and original vein, and I think that the less you bother yourself about critical canons the less chance there is of your becoming self-conscious and cramped. I should therefore, advise the great writers – Shakespeare, Goethe, Scott, &c &c, who give ideas and don’t prescribe rules.’33
In Swanage Emma had been doing some writing of her own, a short novel which she called The Maid on the Shore.34 It is in nineteen chapters, set in north Cornwall, and the best parts of it are the descriptions, of the seashore where the country women come at low tide with panniered donkeys, collecting sand for the farmers, of the bleak moorland and ‘dreary interminable roads’, of the miserable mud cottages with dirty children and of the poor farms, each with a few fields, barn, poultry, pig, horse, cart and plough. Against this she tells an unhappy love story of two cousins, Claude and Rosabelle, who are engaged, until Claude deserts her and runs off to London with an uneducated but exotically beautiful Cornish girl he has met on the beach. After complications Rosabelle finds happiness with Claude’s quiet and steady best friend. Claude is disappointed in his love and grows ill living a hectic life in London, returns to Cornwall, falls off a cliff and dies. Emma had no gift for characterization and little idea of how to write fiction, and it would be hard for even the most determined editor to make anything of her story, but she did get it written to the end, it is reasonably coherent, and it uses what she knew of Cornish life. It is not absolutely unreadable, even if you keep hoping it will improve, and end by feeling sorry for Emma having worked so determinedly to so little effect. If she showed it to Hardy and he commented, it may have made a difficult moment for both of them.
Hardy managed to maintain a quite spectacular anonymity well into middle age. There is not a single written description of him – or of Emma – throughout the first six years of the marriage, although his name as an author was becoming known. It is true that for a whole decade he and Emma were on the move between London, the Continent and various parts of Dorset, going from place to place, living in lodgings with landlords and ladies who would not have noticed or cared who they were, travelling, renting houses in out-of-the-way places and making few friends – none of them the sort of people who would think of writing down their impressions of the Hardys. Marriage across class boundaries was also isolating. Some of their relatives complained, not entirely without reason, that they appeared to be wandering about like tramps.35 Part of Hardy always wanted to guard his privacy. Like Ethelberta, he was unsure where he belonged and could not solve his problem by marrying into the peerage. Emma was also shy.36 Even the friendship with Leslie Stephen became inactive with Hardy’s marriage and the death of Minny, and, although the two men corresponded, they met only occasionally.37
Hardy’s own recollections were written down fifty years afterwards. Then he approached those years with as much caution as Leslie Stephen would have recommended in his most stringent editorial mood. His second wife, acting as adviser and editor, had no interest in expanding his account of his best years with Emma, since she was hostile to her memory. A few of his notebook entries are copied into the Life, almost all worth reading. But really we know little more than where they settled and where they travelled, what Emma wrote in her diary and he in a handful of letters, almost all professional, and how his career progressed. We have to accept that he intended his personal life to be kept private except for the very occasional confession, and that the story he wanted told was what he put into his books.
They left England on 29 May, taking the train from Liverpool Street and crossing from Harwich to Rotterdam. Emma started a new and rather disorganized diary in the back of her honeymoon one. She observed German ladies with many babies on the steamer, and that the sea is higher than the land at Scheveningen in Holland. They took a Rhine steamer, saw Cologne (where ‘T. was angry about the brandy flask’), Coblenz and Heidelberg, Baden-Baden and the Black Forest. In Strasbourg she was ill with an ulcerated throat that was treated with the brandy and a patent medicine fetched by Hardy. From Brussels they visited the battlefield of Waterloo, where a woman brought out two baskets, one of bread, the other of skulls, with perfect teeth, before giving them cake to eat and some flowers to take away. That day they walked a long way in the heat, and the next day she noted, ‘I am still greatly fatigued and Tom is cross about it.’ At the end of the trip she wrote, ‘Going back to England where we have no home and no chosen county.’ This was on 18 June, and on the next page she was able to write ‘July 3. 1876. Riverside Villa. Sturminster Newton’. Here Hardy started work on a book that surpassed any he had yet written.