'My home was a most intellectual one and not only
so but one of exquisite home-training and refinement—alas the difference the loss of these amenities and gentlenesses has made to met' Poor, silly, snobbish Emma Hardy, one doesn't envy her husband (and the trouble was that she did so). Did she really say to him, 'Try to remember, Thomas Hardy, that you married a lady'? One can believe it. The publication of the full text of her Recollections throws a little more light on this, the minor tragedy of their marriage. For when she met Hardy she had come down in the world. There had been less money since her grandmother's death. Bodmin had been dull after Plymouth. She was twenty-nine now and
living with a married sister she disliked. She was looking back, no doubt. 'Oh what parties we had at Plymouth everywhere. The military and navy usually present, tarlatine dresses and book-muslin the most frequent kind of dresses worn. . . . Splendid sashes and stockings and shoes also adorned us, and our hair floated about in the rush of air made by our whirlings.' Of the major tragedy of the marriage—that she suffered, or Hardy thought she suffered, from hereditary insanity—there is not much hint, un- less you count her eccentric father, who had a broken heart, and drank, and recited Shake- sPeare by candlelight in the afternoon.
Hardy found the manuscript of Emma's Recollections at her death, together with two others which he destroyed. He published part of it in The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, mean- ing perhaps to print more, as his corrections run right through the text. It has connections with many of the 'Poems of 1912-13,' and per- haps inspired one or two; indeed, almost cer- tainly so in the case of the wonderful 'During Wind and Rain'—where the `They' who 'sing their dearest songs' are clearly the Giffords in their Plymouth days and the move to a 'high new house' the one described in Emma's manu- script. The present editors, Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings, have made a find here, and one or two others of less importance as well. They are surely right in thinking that Hardy's voman riding high above with bright hair flapping free' is a direct echo of Emma's own description of herself 'scampering up and down the hills on my beloved mare . . . my hair float- ing in the wind.' Some of their derivations are shakier. I can't see what they think Emma's inno-
cent little phrase about the `solemn small shores' could have contributed to 'After a Journey.' And Emma, prattling, rambling, no great
speller, her sentences in ruins, turns out to be a
charming writer; charming for what we see over her shoulder—`marble-paved' Plymouth in the Fifties, a rage for pet fowl, the shocking new Puseyite Sisterhood, a remarkable water-purifier
—and charming also for her own dewy style: but my friends were enriched by the finding of clay on the estate whilst I was there. A large bowl was brought to us all to look at one evening and pounded and prodded and handled lovingly and chuckled over; it proved to be of excellent quality, whitest of white and pliable and the agent came•and settled it all. It was a valuable asset to their income, but if it had all been under the house what would they have done?
P. N. FURBANK
Previous page
