Out of the obscure

CLAIRE TOMALIN'S life of Thomas Hardy does not begin, as one would expect, with its subject's birth and antecedents, but with the death of his first wife Emma in 1912. This play with the narrative conventions of biography turns out to be a masterstroke, drawing the reader into Hardy's emotional universe, and giving human shape to the literary critical argument that it is as a poet, rather than a novelist, that the author of “Tess of the D'Urbervilles” achieved his finest work.

Emma's death released the poet in Hardy, who was by that time one of the most successful novelists of his generation, but a man whose private life was shadowed by a problematic childless marriage. The couple—who had married for love in 1874 despite differences in class and parental opposition—had become so alienated that she had taken to spending her time apart in an attic room. He barely noticed the severity of her last illness until it was too late. “Em, don't you know me?” were his revealing last words to her unconscious body, when he was finally summoned to her side (his first response, before mounting the stairs, was to tell the maid to straighten her collar).

If this Hardy seems cold, the great wave of love poetry to Emma that burst from him after her death was anything but. Delving into the nuanced complexities of attachment and alienation, guilt and loss, with a strange idiosyncratic spareness of style that seemed both modernist and unique to contemporaries, he revisited the subject obsessively. This aroused the jealousy of his much younger second wife, Florence, an acolyte who, unlike Emma, fell in love with a rich and famous grand old man of letters, rather than an ardently striving newcomer.

The son of working-class parents, Hardy grew up in the Dorset countryside, which he later recreated as the landscape of his novels. His father was a builder, his mother a former servant with unusual literary tastes and formidable educational aspirations for her physically unprepossessing son. Forced by an unplanned pregnancy into marriage, she felt a lifelong ambivalence towards the institution, which her children inherited: three of them remained single while Thomas's novels often focused on marriage's tragic side. He became a writer after an unfulfilling apprenticeship as an architect. His earliest novel, “The Poor Man and the Lady”, unpublished and now lost, explored many of the class issues which would resurface in “Tess” and “Jude the Obscure”.

“Jude” included probably the most painful scene in literature—in which a small child hangs his siblings and himself—and though Ms Tomalin shows some exasperation with her subject over this maudlin melodrama, his reasons for being drawn to such frankly sadistic imaginings remain mysterious. Nevertheless, this biography, from one of the most accomplished practitioners of the art, is a work of supreme sensitivity and control. Managing her materials with deceptive ease and fluency, Ms Tomalin provides an object lesson in how to write a life.