The First Mrs Thomas Hardy , and: The Second Mrs Hardy (review)

Abstract

Reviews Denys Kay-Robinson, The First Mrs Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan , 1979. 278 pp. £7.95. Robert Gittings and Jo Mantón, The Second Mrs Hardy. London: Heinemann; Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. 150 pp. $10.95. The Hardy industry has produced two more books illuminating the life of Thomas Hardy. Denys Kay-Robinson has done a thorough study of Hardy's first marriage through the life of the provocative Emma Lavinia Gifford. Author of books on English counties and of radio plays, he has previously written one of the best Hardy guidebooks, Hardy's Wessex Re-appraised (1972). Robert Gittings and Jo Mantón (Mrs. Gittings) have combined their talents in writing a fine life of Florence Emily Dugdale, the second Mrs. Hardy. Gittings has published a biography of Keats and two volumes on Thomas Hardy; Mantón has written lives of two outstanding women, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, the first woman doctor in England, and Sister Dora (Dorothy Pattison), the industrial nurse. Jo Manton's understanding of late Victorian women and their position in society is clearly an aid in her work on Mrs. Hardy. There is no evidence of a division of labor in the Gittings' The Second Mrs Hardy, for the subject matter is uniformly handled and the style is direct and clear. Denys Kay-Robinson, in his longer biography, The First Mrs Thomas Hardy, which is in many ways dependent upon the scholarship of Robert Gittings in Young Thomas Hardy (1975) and Thomas Hardy's Later Years (1978), REVIEWS 263 has also produced a scholarly study with a strong defense of Emma Hardy in opposition to those who for years, especially since the work of Carl J. Weber in 1940, have attacked her as the cause of the novelist 's unhappy life. The Gittings' and Kay-Robinson are in agreement in their basic interpretations of the three principals involved: Hardy, Emma, and Florence. Both books reveal careful investigation of sources (using new material in some instances), and both contain indexes , notes of sources, and lists of major works cited. That the KayRobinson book is more than one hundred pages longer than the Gittings ' book is partly dependent on the fact that Hardy's first marriage covered thirty-eight years, while the second was limited to fourteen years. Emma lived to be seventy-two, while Florence survived her husband by only nine years and died at fifty-eight. Also, a great deal of Hardy's autobiographical poetry relates to Emma and very little to Florence; Kay-Robinson quotes scores of passages from Hardy's poems to illustrate his thesis. In his published lectures, The Nature of Biography (1978), given at the University of Washington, Robert Gittings says that "the double biography of a relationship, which throws light on both characters, is a fruitful development of modern life-writing." I wish that he and Jo Mantón had written a "dual biography" of Thomas Hardy's two wives, or that Denys Kay-Robinson had done so. No doubt both biographers knew that the other was writing on a Mrs. Hardy at the same time, and this may well have prevented either from doing a double life. The two lives were published in 1979, but I gather that the Gittings ' life came out first, and it is the only one of the two published in the U.S.A. as well as in England. Kay-Robinson refers to Robert Gittings ' earlier two books on Hardy (but not to this one on Florence) at least twenty-five times, usually in corroboration of his own view but sometimes to correct. Neither Emma Gifford nor Florence Dugdale has ever before had a book-length biography, yet each has long deserved one. Emma was, in her way, a more interesting personality than Florence. There are fascinating parallels, often ironic contrasts, in these two lives. Both women were ambitious to write, but did so unsuccessfully; both were classconscious , though in quite different ways; one was conventionally pious , the other an unbeliever; most important of all—both were married to Thomas Hardy. Not only the parallels are interesting, but the triangulation of these two lives with that of Hardy himself is illuminating : Emma helped...