Blunden, Edmund, Thomas Hardy. London, Macmillan, 1942.
Brennecke, Ernst, The Life of Thomas Hardy. New York, Greenberg, 1925.
Chew, Samuel, Thomas Hardy: Poet and Novelist. Bryn Mawr College and New York,
Longmans, Green & Co., 1921.
Cox, J. Stevens (ed.), Thomas Hardy: Materials for a Study of his Life,
Times and Works.
St Peter Port, Guernsey, Toucan Press, Vol. I 1968, Vol. II 1971.
Deacon, Lois, and Coleman, Terry, Providence and Mr. Hardy. London, Hutchinson,
1966.
Gittings, Robert, Young Thomas Hardy. London, Heinemann, 1975.
----------------, The Older Hardy. London, Heinemann, 1978.
Hardy, Evelyn, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography. London, The Hogarth Press,
1954.
Hardy, Florence, The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840-1891. London, Macmillan
1928.
---------------, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy. London, Macmillan, 1930.
Hedgcock, Frank A., Thomas Hardy: Penseur et Artiste. Paris, Librairie Hachette,
1911.
Millgate, Michael, Thomas Hardy: A Biography. Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1982.
Weber, Carl, Hardy of Wessex. London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1940, rev. ed.
1965.
From about 1910 until his death in 1928, Hardy was commonly regarded as the most
eminent English man of letters of his time. The three studies published during this period, by
HEDGCOCK, CHEW and BRENNECKE -- this last the first book-length life -- all
acknowledge this position, but characteristically Hardy did his best to obstruct their writing,
and they are interesting now mainly for his numerous marginal annotations to the copies
subsequently lodged in the Dorchester County Museum. The insistent burden of these
comments is that no connections can be made between Hardy's own life and the events and
characters of his novels; such speculation is dismissed as 'unmannerly' and 'impertinent', or
simply 'inaccurate'. Later biographers have predictably been unimpressed by these
disclaimers.
In 1915 or 1916, in an attempt to forestall other biographers, Hardy began with his second wife Florence the two volumes published under her name in 1928 and 1930, and still ascribed to FLORENCE HARDY when published in one volume as The Life of Thomas Hardy (1962). However, the deception was successful only until 1940, when the bibliographer Richard Purdy explained how Hardy had carefully drafted a manuscript version of the text, which was typed by Florence and then destroyed, any corrections being either added to the ribbon copy by Florence, or entered by Hardy in a disguised calligraphic hand. Since Hardy was the author of the first 34 chapters, and had a hand in two of the remaining four, it is customary to refer to the Life as an autobiography, but in fact the situation is more complicated. Florence abbreviated the lists of famous people Hardy had met at various dinners and soirées, trimmed his attacks on critics he believed had misrepresented him, and to some extent reduced Emma's presence in the work; she also added a number of anecdotes, supplied mainly by Sir James Barrie, and some letters, including four to Mary Hardy. The typescript passages omitted from the published version of the Life are included in Richard H. Taylor (ed.) The Personal Notebooks of Thomas Hardy (London, Macmillan, 1978); Michael Millgate's The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy (London, Macmillan, 1984) tries to present the text as Hardy himself produced it.
The lives which appeared over the next forty years tend towards celebration, if not outright hagiography. BLUNDEN is interesting in revealing the respect in which the younger poet held the elder, and unusual in commenting on Hardy's 'innocent cheerfulness'. It has the virtues, inconvenient in a biographer, of loyalty and discretion: the Life is accepted as the work of Florence Hardy, the suicide of Hardy's close friend Horace Moule appears merely as a 'tragic death', and the unhappiness of Hardy's marriage to Emma Gifford receives only a passing reference to the 'curious solitariness' of their later years. EVELYN HARDY is more informative, but unduly partisan. She remarks on 'the stressful days' of the childhood of Hardy's mother, but does not uncover the reality of her life as one of seven pauper children. She lauds the lack of ambition of Hardy's father, and credits Hardy with a similar indifference to worldly possessions -- a view at odds with various of the Materials collected by Cox, and with the conclusions of Gittings in particular. She is generally incautious in trusting the Life, accepting, for example, Hardy's spiteful claim that Henry James was rejected by the Rabelais Club as lacking 'virility'. Caution is further abandoned in order to disparage Emma and justify Hardy. Emma is accused of 'belittling' Hardy 'in some horrible animal way', and of suffering from 'religious mania', while he is seen as responding with unfailing courtesy. The view which Hardy and Florence came to share, that Emma suffered from 'delusions', and that there was some hereditary intstability in her family, is accepted here. The role of Florence is correspondingly exalted; her own difficult nature is ignored, and she appears as the loyal and self-effacing wife Emma had failed to be.
WEBER's study was first published in 1940, and even in the revised edition shares many
of these failings, although there is more effort at balance. He notes for example that Hardy's
susceptibility to a succession of literary ladies must have wounded Emma, just as his
infatuation for Gertrude Bugler distressed Florence. But the bias is in Hardy's favour; thus
Weber repeats the canard that Emma asked Richard Garnett to suppress Jude the Obscure,
with the suggestion that she understood neither her husband nor his work, and complements
his account of the Bugler episode by citing Sassoon's reference to Florence's habitual
gloominess, seen not as her response to Hardy's infatuation but as a justification of it. While
both Weber and Evelyn Hardy make welcome if limited attempts to explore the intellectual
context of Hardy's work, both are sketchy and inadequate when dealing with Hardy's sense of
his class and social position. It perhaps indicates the character of these works that the figure
who seems to Weber nearest to Hardy is not a contemporary, but William Shakespeare.
In the revised edition Weber tries, albeit equivocally, to dismiss speculation about Hardy's liaison with his cousin Tryphena Sparks, a story later expanded by DEACON and COLEMAN into the claim that Tryphena was in fact Hardy's niece, that she became the mother of his child, and that guilt about the relationship dogged the rest of his life. Evidence for these theories ranges from the negligible to the derisory, as Gittings in particular has shown. They have been an irritant rather than a contribution to Hardy scholarship.
Hardy biography came of age with GITTINGS, the first life based on genuine research. Gittings adds greatly to our knowledge of Hardy's family background, and of the labourers, cobblers and servants who were his relatives in Puddletown, and a main theme of his study is the pull exerted by Hardy's loyalty to, or as Gittings often represents it, his inability to escape from these family ties. Gittings is more conscious than earlier biographers of the damage done to Hardy's personality by this conflict, and, indeed, presents a more damaged Hardy than had been seen before. The unflattering image that emerges from the recollections of local people gathered together in the monographs edited by COX could be set aside with the reflection that no man is a hero to his valet, but Gittings's study reads at times like a sustained assault on Hardy's character. He writes of Hardy's 'ugly fascination' with brutality, his 'perverse morbidity' about the hanging of Martha Brown, his 'pathological habit of falling in love', his 'intractable temperament' and the 'tortuous deception' of his outward life. He suggests that the idea of Emma's inherited mental imbalance was largely the invention of Florence, whom he sees as another of Hardy's victims (he also describes her as suffering from paranoia). His most serious charge, and the one which most distressed the loyal and faithful among Hardy's readers, is that Hardy tried to 'shut his eyes' to the evidence of Emma's last illness, and then 'tried to shut the eyes of others' after her death. Gittings's increasingly evident dislike for his subject -- Edward Clodd's remark that Hardy had 'no largeness of soul' becomes his leitmotif -- is the main weakness in what is in most other respects a well- informed and intelligent study.
Hardy's admirers have found MILLGATE more sympathetic. As the editor, with Richard Purdy, of the Collected Letters, and with access to papers in Purdy's own collection, Millgate was ideally placed to produce his full and thoughtful study. He gives due weight to Hardy's family background, ascribing Hardy's touchiness on the subject to a desire for accuracy rather than to snobbishness. He provides a valuable account of Hardy's relationship with Eliza Nichols, is informative about Hardy's dealings with his editors and publishers, and is more balanced than his predecessors when describing Hardy's relationship with Emma, noting for example the mutually accommodating self-sufficiency of their lives in the later years. Even so, he is too tolerant of what he calls 'the necessary ruthlessness of an artist', and the suggestion that Emma may have deceived Hardy into marriage by pretending to be pregnant seems as unfounded as it is ungenerous. (This idea, like Gittings's account of the circumstances leading to Moule's suicide, is teased out of Jude the Obscure; neither writer is able to resist such inferences, though both are generally scrupulous in admitting them.) Millgate is more sympathetic to Florence than Gittings, while noting that her behaviour was often erratic as well as unhappy. This will certainly, and deservedly, remain the standard life for some time to come, but Gittings's work will also continue to command attention. That being so, it is a matter for regret that Gittings's various claims and suggestions are not discussed directly by Millgate, making cross-reference between the two unnecessarily difficult, and that there is no bibliography. In other respects, both books are well-produced, well-illustrated and lucidly written, accessible to the general reader and the scholar alike.
--- Phillip Mallett