In her disillusioned later years Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, bitterly reflected: ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’ In Hardy Women, Paula Byrne sets out to recover the stories of the women in his life ‘who did not have a voice and who were often deliberately omitted from Hardy’s self-ghosted autobiography’, in order to reveal that ‘the magnificent fictional women he invented would not have been possible without the hardship and hardiness of the real ones who shaped his passions and his imagination’. She has not come up with anything that radically changes what we already know of Hardy’s background and what he did with it, but her approach works as an interesting exercise in Victorian social history, and she is particularly sensitive to the conflict in Hardy between the indelible influence of his background among the rural Dorset poor and the polite society to which his growing literary fame attached him.

As a lover, Hardy was both extremely susceptible and profoundly unavailable

His mother remains the dominant influence. Jemima Hardy was probably the beneficiary of a charitable education as well as the survivor of a rough country childhood on poor relief. She went into service at the age of 13, already knowing that her favourite author was Dante. Hardy never publicly admitted that Jemima had been a servant, or that she was pregnant when she left service to marry a builder who brought her to live with his mother in a cottage in Higher Bockhampton on the outskirts of Dorchester.

Jemima’s aspirations were thenceforth turned on her children. She sent Thomas, her first-born, to school, aged five, with Dryden’s Virgil and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas. He was a notably brilliant child, attentive and musical and passionately attached to his aristocratic patron teacher despite a general aversion to being touched. Jemima’s experience as one too many of a violent, drunken father left her fierce in the conviction that her children had much better not marry. Three of the four obeyed, with both her daughters training as schoolteachers nearby. But Thomas was apprenticed to an architect and escaped to London in the early 1860s.

There he continued on the path of self-improvement, teaching himself Greek and reading and writing poetry. But Byrne’s careful sleuthing suggests he may have entered into as many as three secret engagements, two with servant girls and one with a teacher cousin. Nothing came of them, except some early poems in which his later themes of loss and regret are clearly marked. After five years he returned to Dorset. In 1870, aged 30, he wrote in his diary: ‘Mother’s notion & also mine: that a figure stands in our van with arm uplifted to knock us back from any pleasant prospect we indulge in as probable.’

Hardy’s courtship of Emma Gifford may have been an unconscious attempt to emancipate himself from the continuing influence of his mother. He was attracted to Emma’s social superiority, as well as her horsemanship and belief in him as an artist. Her encouragement led him to give up architecture for fiction, at the expense of a long engagement while he made his way. But his success, and their childlessness, left her beached. As a lover, Hardy was both extremely susceptible and profoundly unavailable, perhaps because his susceptibility was always undercut by his pessimism. As a young man, he had fallen in love often, and always moved on. Once married, unavailability took the form of a retreat behind the study door. The problem was not that Hardy only understood the women he invented; rather, he invented the women he loved and reality could not durably match his inventions. He could love his fictional heroines with less ambivalence.

Despite spending periods in London – which Emma preferred – Hardy determinedly settled in Dorset, eventually at Max Gate, the gloomy villa he designed and had built by his father and brother three miles from where he had been born. He saw his family regularly but Emma did not. Hardy’s characteristic response to the rift was to write The Return of the Native (1878), with its implacable tension between Mrs Yeobright and Eustacia Vye. John Bayley has suggested that Eustacia  shows ‘how strongly Hardy was attracted to women whom he would have found it hard to get along with in the long run’.

Some literary visitors found Emma garrulous, inconsequential and embarrassingly keen to assert her middle-class credentials and church connections. Others perceived her sweetness, cut with loneliness and resentment at her husband’s withdrawal. But few could doubt that the confrontations which Hardy avoided in life were the well-springs of his art. His more biddable second wife, Florence, appeared happy to underwrite the sanitised version of his public life that became their joint project, although she chafed under Hardy’s very public mourning for the wife of whose neglect she had been a passive accessory. She did not have to read Hardy and Emma’s love letters because Emma had burnt them; but Hardy told her the lost correspondence had equalled that of the Brownings. Reading Jane Austen to him in the evenings, she noted: ‘TH is much amused at finding he has many characteristics in common with  Mr Woodhouse.’ On another occasion she was relieved to find Hardy’s depression lift at writing a poem – ‘always a sign of well being with him. Needless to say, it is a dismal poem.’

Her asperity sounds a refreshing note, but it may be that Philip Larkin, one of Hardy’s greatest followers, sheds more light, albeit of a darkish kind:

Not till his first wife had died could Hardy’s love poetry for her be written… This kind of paradox is inseparable from poetic creation, and indeed from life altogether. At times it almost appears a sort of basic insincerity in human affection. At others, it seems a flaw built deeply into the workings of the emotions, creating an inevitable bias in life towards unhappiness. Indeed, it was itself part of Hardy’s subject matter.