Music to Move the Stars - A Life with Stephen. By Jane Hawking. Macmillan. 610pp. £20 in UK
Genius is a much-abused term these days. However, there can be little doubt that Stephen Hawking, Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge and author of A Brief History Of Time, is the real thing in the Einstein, Newtonian sense of the word. Neither Mrs E nor Mrs N vouchsafed us their views on what it was like being married to a genius, but it's a pound-to-a-penny it was no easy ride. Add to the equation a body severely disabled, and you have the situation faced by Hawking's wife of 25 years, without whose devotion and sheer tenacity he probably would not have survived to become what he has become. At least that is the impression one gets from reading Jane Hawking's harrowing and compelling account of those years. No doubt, given the acrimonious ending of the marriage - he subsequently married his nurse - Stephen Hawking may tell a different story if he ever decides to write it. For the time being, this is all we have, but it rings very true.
The Hawking marriage was not one of true minds, nor did it admit impediments, though impediments there most certainly were right from the start. Motor neurone disease had already been diagnosed in the 22-year-old Cambridge postgraduate before the couple met. Although both families came from St Albans and knew each other from afar, by any objective standard the Hawkings were exceptionally eccentric. From the start they disapproved of Jane - a nice middle-class girl but who, in their eyes, wasn't intellectually up to the mark. However, to dispel any doubts about her intelligence, the book has more pages on Provencal poetry (the subject of a PhD she completed 15 years after she started it in the face of outrageous lack of support from her spouse) than it does on astrophysics - indeed the scientific passages bear all the hallmarks of being written by somebody else, lacking the adjective-heavy quality of the rest of the writing.
And therein lies the paradox at the heart of this marriage. Jane had no interest in physics, maths or the stars (except in the romantic sense), and Stephen Hawking had no interest in including her in his world. Her role was as housekeeper, mother, chauffeur, typist, nurse and outlet for sex. Yet, although he barely talked to her, he would travel nowhere without her - indeed, for the first 20 years of their marriage he would not allow any professional nursing staff near him, trusting only Jane, his children and his male students to cope with his physical needs.
Eventually it became too much. In 1985 a severe attack of pneumonia resulted in a tracheotomy and with it the computer voice that we now take as Hawking's own. Twenty-four-hour care became essential (the tube needs regular clearing) at the cost of £36,000 a year. It was paid for by an American charity before royalties from A Brief History Of Time took over, not a penny being contributed by the British health service. As the team of nursing professionals took over, so the oasis of calm - the family home - that Jane had created and kept going in the face of a bleak personal future was destroyed.
The computer devised to help him communicate inadvertently gave him an independence he had never had before. And with the publication of A Brief History, his new-found celebrity made him prey, Jane believes, to sycophancy - a victim, she writes, of "that peculiar naivety, born of his hyper-intelligence, which can blind the famous to the Machiavellian subtleties of personalities and motivations" (referring to the nurse who supplanted her in Hawking's affections). That Jane and the children were able to survive was due in large measure to Jonathan Hellyer Jones, choirmaster at her local church, whose devotion to the entire Hawking family is as near saintly as it gets these days.
Although there had obviously been some sort of marital sex (they have three children, now grown up), it had never been normal. "Of necessity it was unadventurous, and he was and always had been the passive partner because of muscular weakness. My side of the experience was so empty and frightening that it constantly left my nerves raw and jangling and my body unsettled and frustrated." She and Hellyer Jones met in 1978. She was still young, just 34, and her knight on a white charger was even younger, having just lost his wife to leukaemia. However, as both were Christians (and as such derided by Stephen Hawking) their relationship remained platonic for many years, both having agreed that her disabled husband could not just be abandoned.
Intensely romantic (her favourite book is Alain Fournier's Le Grand Meaulnes), Jane Hawking eventually got her happy ending. But what a journey. Are geniuses allowed to be this egocentric, this monstrous? Good for society and history perhaps, but devastating to one woman and her children.
Penelope Dening is an author and journalist