Muses, lovers, sisters, wives – Thomas Hardy’s trouble with women

From Tess to Bathsheba, he created some of literature’s most enduring female characters, writes Robert McCrum. But it’s the many real women who shaped the life of the tortured, mysterious, solitary and tyrannical genius novelist and poet, that a new biography most vividly reanimates

‘Hardy Women’ follows the female influences and creations of the celebrated novelist and poet (Harper Collins)

On the menu of great literary lives, Thomas Hardy is a tough egg. Almost a century after his death, it’s hard to fully conjure, still less quite to comprehend, the spell his novels exerted over his Victorian, Edwardian, and finally, his inter-war modernist readers. Simultaneously, his reputation as a poet continues to soar.

Even in his own time, the drift and span of Hardy’s inspiration was strange and remarkable. Here was a writer, born remote from metropolitan society, who had witnessed a public hanging as a boy and survived into the age of Marconi, the machine gun and the Ford Model T. To a unique degree, he had known popular acclaim as a bestselling novelist (Far fom the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure etc), as well as the awestruck admiration of contemporary poets for influential collections of verse such as Satires of Circumstance (1914). Both DH Lawrence the novelist, and Philip Larkin the poet, among many 20th-century greats, declare an explicit debt to Hardy. In this quirky reappraisal, Paula Byrne, the latest celebrant of his genius, rightly salutes “some of the greatest love poems in the English language”.

During his prime, which was remarkably evergreen, Hardy’s life as a writer, magnified by the power of the fin-de-siecle mass media, became exposed to many of the trials familiar to famous writers today. His numerous fans, American as much as British, could not get enough of him; his family was always a torment. Notoriously, Hardy’s paranoia about his biography was hardly assuaged by his first wife, Emma. The journal, discovered after her death in 1912, (“What I Think About My Husband”), inspired the poet’s fiery and apocalyptic riposte: during the summer of 1918, Hardy made a bonfire of his manuscripts, correspondence, notebooks and press cuttings.