The marriage of Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford grew increasingly unhappy after several years and when Gifford died suddenly in 1912, Hardy discovered she had been keeping diaries in which she detailed her sense of his having abandoned her, completely dedicating himself to his novels instead.
Hardy grieved in the face of the diaries’ recollections of the young woman he had loved, the awful failure of their relationship and its devastating consequences for Gifford. Long before her physical death, she viewed her life as over: “This is how we exist now: two people in their coffins, two ghosts, stacked one on top of the other.”
So horrified was Hardy by the diaries that he burned them and in this novel, in an extraordinary feat of imagination, perception and empathy, Elizabeth Lowry re-creates passages from them, conveying a vivid sense of Gifford the person: her acute insights into her husband’s novels, her feelings as a frustrated writer, and her sense of physical, intellectual and emotional isolation.
Max Gate (the Dorset house Hardy built for them), in the days and weeks after Gifford’s death, is superbly brought to life in all its over-spacious gloominess. Hardy’s pragmatic sisters (who always felt Gifford looked down on them) and his secretary Florence Dugdale, with whom he had been having a platonic relationship and who he later married, expected him to be glad to be rid of his difficult wife and to get on with his life. However, he reflects deeply on his and Gifford’s lost love, the result of which was the beautiful sequence of elegies, Poems 1912-13, one of the finest of which is The Voice (“Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me”).
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Must dedication to literary success inevitably have detrimental consequences for those closest to us? This is one of the great questions the novel addresses, offering no easy answers but articulating the various perspectives involved instead.
Lowry’s style is mainly one of restraint, keeping a brake on any tendency towards a tone that is too tragic or melodramatic. Her extensive research is obvious and she shows compassion for all of her characters, as her skill as a novelist demonstrates the power of good fiction to convey the essence of historical characters and situations in a way factual accounts often cannot.
