Biography: This is the second full-scale Hardy biography to come out this year. Ralph Pite's Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life was published by Picador in the summer, and like Claire Tomalin's it is fair-minded and level-headed (especially when it comes to Hardy's first wife, Emma, and all the gossip, accusation and obfuscation surrounding her). Both biographies are, indeed, exhaustive and exhilarating. But the current one, on top of that, is a triumph of literary and biographical insight.
It is intensely imagined and engagingly written. Claire Tomalin approaches the well-known facts of Thomas Hardy's life with a new and prodigious verve and cogency. She opens her account with the death of Hardy's first wife in 1912 - the death that made a poet - before shifting her narrative back to 1840 and the author's almost uniquely inauspicious beginnings. The oldest child of an ex-domestic servant and a construction worker with musical gifts, Hardy was conceived out of wedlock, born in a cottage in remotest Dorsetshire, and came into the world as a puny infant who was nearly written off at birth.
However, he clung on to life, his health improved, and his intellectual and social progress started early, even if the former never included the university education he'd have relished. By the time he was 16 Hardy was apprenticed to a Dorchester architect and becoming independent of his formative surroundings, a process accelerated by his instinctive allegiance to "the world of books and scholarship" and consequent leaning towards authorship himself. But it was going to take a good many years, some changes of scene and innumerable setbacks, before his first published novel, Desperate Remedies, would make it into print.
In the meantime he continued with his architectural training, spent five years in London gaining an urban polish before an unspecified illness sent him home again to Dorset and his mother's ministrations, and gradually distanced himself from the religious programming of his youth, as well as bringing his tremendous powers of observation to bear on the social and moral condition of England, the indices of the era. During the period when he failed to get his poetry published, he was busy preparing himself for his subsequent expertise and celebrity as the country's foremost chronicler of rural milieus and major emotional upheavals.
His own emotional life was about to take a turn. In 1870, in Cornwall on architectural business, he met a young woman with great quantities of corn-gold hair and literary aspirations of her own.
Emma Gifford. Socially a cut above Hardy, she seems to have made no bones about upsetting her family by agreeing to marry him (just as he upset his), as soon as his financial position would allow this step to be taken. They were duly married in London in 1874, in the presence of Emma's brother but without a single member of Hardy's family attending. Emma then fitted in with Hardy's peripatetic tendencies - as his biographer says, in the first eight years of their marriage, the couple moved house seven times, shunting between London and Dorset, Surbiton, Sturminster Newton, Dorchester, Wimborne and all. As far as their relatives were concerned the two of them seemed to be constantly wandering about all over the place like a pair of tramps. Eventually, they did settle down, once the acquisition of a plot of land near Dorchester enabled Hardy to design and build the house most closely associated with him, Max Gate. From the mid-1880s on, the Hardys were established here, though it brought Emma geographically close to her husband's family, with whom she didn't get on.
There were, however, many trips abroad and rented houses in London during "the Season", courtesy of Hardy's enhanced position as a literary lion, entitled to dine grandly at the Savile Club and take his place among the Brownings and the Tennysons and the Leslie Stephens. The novel that made his literary credentials secure was Far From the Madding Crowd, but the best were still to come: The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Woodlanders, Tess, Jude. Not that the reception of any of these was uniformly ecstatic; in fact, the blackness of mood evinced at times in these works left many readers appalled. One of the great strengths of Claire Tomalin's biography is its engagement with the drift and substance of Hardy's novels, their sometimes unbearable power and unrelenting swoop.
Reading Jude, she says, "is like being hit in the face over and over again". This was the effect Hardy wanted, and after Jude, when he achieved it to the full, he turned his back on fiction to concentrate on poetry, an ambition he claimed he had always nourished.
But his greatest achievement as a poet came after the death of Emma, in his recapitulations of their early life together; like Thomas Carlyle after the death of his wife Jane, it seems that Hardy felt considerable remorse for certain failures of sympathy and kindness on his part during the long years of their marriage. In the judgement of many among his friends and acquaintances, though, Emma had a tinge of "the madwoman in the attic" about her, especially after she'd taken herself to the top floor of the house and conducted most of her life up there.
Nevertheless, her work in connection with animal rights and the Movement for Women's Suffrage commands our admiration. If Hardy's second wife, Florence Dugdale, held his final, lyrical version of Emma to be a total delusion, a fiction in which he'd come to believe himself - well, Florence had her own axe to grind (and her behaviour on becoming the mistress of Max Gate, when she promptly got rid of Emma's beloved cats and installed a biting dog, doesn't endear her to us). Of course Emma had faults in the domestic sphere, like everyone else - but if some inner torment drove her and Hardy to behave exceedingly badly towards one another at times, Hardy no less than his wife must bear a good deal of the responsibility for the consequent domestic disharmony. And it wasn't, indeed, all gloom and agitation. Claire Tomalin has a couple of vignettes of the two of them in high spirits bicycling about the country together in late middle age, never minding the scrapes and sprains resulting from the activity. Of Hardy's famous evasiveness she says: "He might appear as a bald old eagle and be unreadable as a sphinx, but he kept his direct access to the world of nature and feeling as freshly as a young man.". And he kept his interest in detail as well, harking back to the time when he'd go about making notes of local idiosyncrasies and vivid turns of phrase, as on the subject of the parson who has been asked to pray for a sick person: "His prayers wouldn't save a mouse".
Patricia Craig is a critic and biographer. Her Ulster Anthology will be published by Blackstaff next month
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man By Claire Tomalin Viking, 486pp. £25