Guest review: Julia Jarman rediscovers Thomas Hardy, in FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD

"Looking back, I see that Thomas Hardy has been giving me life lessons and writing lessons for many years ... "

Julia Jarman, a regular contributor to Writers Review, has been writing children’s books for forty years, and still is. Recently, though, she turned her hand to ‘golden years’ women’s fiction and The Widows' Wine Club was the happy result, followed by Widows on the Wine Path and Windows Waive the Rules; she is currently at work on the fourth title.

My off-on relationship with Thomas Hardy has lasted a long time. I was underwhelmed by Under the Greenwood Tree when I read it at school, and by The Trumpet Major, though I liked that, or rather the eponymous hero, a bit more. Miss Lemmon was keen on Hardy, and even keener on Jane Austen, but I didn’t like Jane either. My early-teenage self scorned Pride and Prejudice as trivial and much preferred an author called Frank G Slaughter who wrote hospital romances, with handsome surgeons wielding knives, and from whom I learned about full frontal lobotomies. (Which led to my appreciation of the joke, if joke it is, that I would rather have a full bottle in front of me than a full frontal lobotomy. Thank you, Frank.)

I came to adore Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure. They both appealed to my more mature teenage self who was outraged by injustice and loved a good cry. This lasted into my twenties and Tess and Jude are still on my bookshelf – or so I thought till I checked. They weren’t, but Under the Greenwood Tree, The Trumpet Major – filched from school! - The Woodlanders and Far From the Madding Crowd were. I began to question my memory and when I thumbed the pages of The Trumpet Major and saw that the name of the hero was John Loveday I started to think that Thomas Hardy had had a bigger influence on me than I have given him credit for, and that I liked him a lot more than I remembered. I have used the name Loveday for one of my own male heroes!

I do know I’ve changed a lot over the years. Somewhere along the line I joined the mass of humanity who cannot bear too much reality, and prefer to laugh rather than cry. I do not need to be reminded of all the injustice in the world, is my excuse. I want to escape from it in the pages of a book. Call me shallow if you like, but though I prefer realism to fantasy, I like a bit of uplift with it, and Hardy doesn’t deliver.

Was I unduly influenced by the critic, F R Leavis, popular in my youth, who declared Hardy second-rate? He didn’t include him in the select group of writers he thought to be in ‘the great tradition’ of the British novel, thinking the hand of Fate too heavy in his melodramatic plots. I share the view that the more satisfying novels have plot arising from character, and I remembered the hand of destiny being much too evident in Hardy. Maybe that’s why I felt justified not-reading him and we lost touch.

Till recently.

Fortunately my friend, Celia Rees, re-introduced us, and reminded me, even before the Loveday discovery, that he has never been as far away as I thought. It came about when Celia read my work in progress, The Widows’ Wine and Book Club, fourth in my Widows series, and, referring to a certain incident, she said, ‘That’s straight out of Thomas Hardy, Far From the Madding Crowd to be precise.’

OMG! I had to re-read it on Kindle – I was away from home - to see if I had committed a dastardly act of plagiarism or a commendable act of post-modern intertextuality. Re-read it, note, though at that moment I couldn’t remember ever reading it. In my own defence my first read was over fifty years ago. When I got home I found my copy, a 1968 Pan edition with a photo of Julie Christie as Bathsheba Everdene, on the cover. Inside, on the first page, was Gabriel Oak with whom I instantly fell in love, or re-fell, like the twenty-something me who first read it, and I kept reading. It was nothing like I remembered – or didn’t remember – but I must have absorbed it and I hope learned a thing or two.

What a story!

Hardy plunges straight in. No long preamble. We meet the hero and then the heroine – he’s watching her sitting on top of an overloaded cart - and the story starts to unfold. He writes vividly. He shows us that in small country places, far from the madding crowds, passions fly high in ‘ordinary’ people, that ordinary people are extraordinary. The descriptions of the Dorset countryside are done with more economy than I misremembered, enhancing the story not overwhelming it. I saw no sign of the heavy hand of Fate. Everything arises from character in this novel, and he creates brilliant characters. Bathsheba is a wonderfully realistic heroine, passionate, impulsive, vain, competent, and in a crucial incident, that incident, she is careless of another person’s feelings and so heedless of the consequences, that I expected tragedy, which there is for some. Gabriel Oak is a convincing thoroughly decent man, a thoroughly human man with faults and virtues, who rises to heroism. Farmer Boldwood is another thoroughly decent man, tragically lacking in insight, and Sergeant Troy is an all too believable s***, an attractive s*** to some, but not me.

Sorry, but spoiler alert. Stop reading now if you don’t want to know. I’ll write it tiny to help you, but it isn’t a tragedy, there’s a happy ending, a happy ending from Hardy. I loved it and highly recommend! Looking back, I see that Thomas Hardy has been giving me life lessons and writing lessons for many years. So kiss me, Hardy! Thank you!

Far from the Madding Crowd is published by Vintage Classics.

Guest review by Sophie Haydock: THE CHOSEN by Elizabeth Lowry

 

"A haunting and accomplished portrait of raw grief, of dissatisfied love, of regret, and the self-imposed sacrifices one makes in a bid for greatness." 

Sophie Haydock's debut novel, The Flames, is about the four muses who posed for the artist Egon Schiele in fin-de-siècle Vienna. She is the winner of the Impress Prize for New Writers and in 2022 The Flames was longlisted for the Historical Writers' Association Debut Crown Award.

Sophie trained as a journalist at City University, London, and has worked at the Sunday Times Magazine, Tatler and BBC Three, as well as freelancing for publications including the Financial Times, Guardian Weekend magazine, Arts Council, Royal Academy and Sotheby’s.

She has interviewed leading authors, including Hilary Mantel, Maggie O’Farrell, Bernardine Evaristo, Sally Rooney and Amy Tan. Passionate about short stories, Sophie also works as a digital editor for the Sunday Times Audible Short Story Award and is associate director of the Word Factory literary organisation.

Her Instagram account @egonschieleswomen – dedicated to the women who posed for Egon Schiele – has a community of over 110,000 followers. For more information, visit: sophie-haydock.com

A marriage is a mysterious union, even to the people who are bound by it. It’s this sentiment that haunts Elizabeth Lowry’s judderingly poetic novel The Chosen, about the writer Thomas Hardy – a self-contained, single-minded man who’s lost the intimate connection to his wife, Emma, over the course of their forty-year marriage, to the extent that they pass in the house they share like ghosts, neither speaking to one another, nor touching; as cold as the grave.

It’s ironic, therefore, that when Hardy – the Victorian writer best known for Tess of the d’Urbervilles – finds the lifeless body of his wife after she dies unexpectedly in the hours after their final bitter argument, he is confronted, for the first time in decades, with a vibrant and urgent vision of a woman who he’s now unwilling to shake to the margins. Indeed, he’s unable to eat, sleep, or write. “Language has left him,” Lowry writes poignantly.

Hardy sees his wife everywhere – as a “smirk of light on the threshold”. She’s “on the cliffs, waving to him across that dark space as the spume flies up: waving or beckoning, goodbye or hello”. He cannot tear his thoughts away, even when Florence, the younger woman with whom he has been engaged in an affair, shows up to take her place by his side. Florence expects to meet a man relieved of his burden, but instead must grapple with a stranger who’s willingly withdrawing from life under the deluge of his grief. “It’s as if he’s being drawn down to the bottom of the sea. He has no choice but to sink. He wants to sink. He hasn’t been able to admit to Florence how powerful this urge is: the desire to slide from himself.”

Emma’s ghost is evoked more sharply when Hardy discovers a cache of notebooks that his downtrodden wife kept secret over their difficult marriage – detailing her resentment at her husband’s stubbornness, his selfish commitment to the imaginary characters he evokes alone in his study, his lack of intimacy, which deprived her of children: “He’s at a loss to know why Emma started keeping such a catalogue of grievances at all […] The uncertainty and unhappiness were, as he remembers things – as till now he’s always thought them – all his.”

Emma’s widow pores over her diaries with the intensity of a scholar. It’s here the poignancy of The Chosen truly deepens. We see Emma through her own eyes, her voice restored, her recollections of their shared life the central force. “I’ve offered my help,” she writes. “I think he’s accepted it – it’s hard to tell. His delicate irony is too often mistaken for tenderness.”

By doing so, the novel agitates themes of the (un)silencing of women, as well as the role of creativity and who takes ownership. Emma herself harboured a desire to write from before she married the then-unpublished author, and her efforts were ridiculed by her husband as his success grew, while her own contributions to his works wilfully dismissed and overlooked.

Hardy is suddenly faced with the most annihilating question of his life: did he know his wife at all, in any meaningful way? As a result, the writer’s inner world, his version of himself and his life’s work, his role as a husband, is detonated, blasted beyond all recognition, his own memories bleached by the accusation found in her words. He cannot believe he no longer has access to the woman who he now realises he has loved so insufficiently for most of her life.

Lowry, as author, blends the facts of the past delicately with her own fictional take on their relationship, and what may have passed between husband and wife. What’s true is that Emma wrote such diaries, the contents of which are a mystery. They were read by Hardy after her death. He was so moved and horrified by her verdict that he burned them, reducing her world to ash. We know of their existence thanks to references in letters made by his new wife.

The Chosen expertly spotlights the interplay of grief and regret, alongside renewed, almost obsessive, love. Hardy turns the problematic reality of Emma, a woman he found difficult when alive, into something concrete he can control – and sets about mourning her in an artistically selfish way, losing himself to her memory. He writes powerful love poetry in her honour, much to the chagrin of Florence, who before long becomes the second Mrs Hardy.

The poignant complexity of marriage is captured beautifully by Lowry, who towards the finale of The Chosen shares a detail that is the redemptive moment for Hardy – that Emma called for her husband from her sick bed: “She wanted you. She said it had to be you, sir.”

Emma’s final gift to her husband was to inspire the poetry that cemented his name as one of the great poets in the English language. “It’s difficult for me to grasp what it means to love you after you are dead, and what I can possibly put into words that you would want to hear.”

Lowry’s The Chosen is a haunting and accomplished portrait of raw grief, of dissatisfied love, of regret, and the self-imposed sacrifices one makes in a bid for greatness. As Hardy realises too late, he has dedicated his life to the wrong passions. “What have I ever written about, Em? he laughs. I thought I was writing about the world, but I was just writing words.”

The Chosen is published by Riverrun.

Sophie's The Flames is reviewed here by Alison MacLeod.