Biography: A charming poem by Thomas Hardy, Snow in the Suburbs, describes the author's front doorstep as "a blanched slope",Up which, with feeble hope,A black cat comes, wide-eyed and thin;And we take him in.
The setting for this small act of kindness is Tooting, on the outskirts of London, where Hardy was living with his wife, Emma (the poem was written in 1879, but not published until 1918), and going through one of his most productive literary phases. He was also busy establishing social contacts and generally acting in a way designed to further his career. He got to know Matthew Arnold, Tennyson, Henry James, Richard Jefferies, Mary Braddon, Sir Leslie Stephen and others during this period, and regularly dined out at various London clubs.
If Emma felt a bit left out of things, she had her own resources, including literary work, cats like the one referred to above, and (later) the movement for women's suffrage, in which she involved herself. This long and muchscrutinised marriage, described as problematic and even ruinous, had ways of effecting accommodations unknown to outsiders - and Hardy's regret for the path not taken, the commitment not made, was never an unambiguous emotion.
Ralph Pite's subtitle for his extensive and enlightening new biography, "The Guarded Life", reminds us just how circumspect Hardy was about his private concerns, and how much conjecture has marked certain earlier biographical studies. Not that informed or creative conjecture comes amiss whenever the records are sparse or the facts are simply unascertainable; but sometimes the process smacks of a hit-or-miss recklessness. Take Tryphena Sparks, for instance, and the impossibility of establishing definitively her role in Hardy's life. She was his cousin and, for a time, the object of his affections; but there's really no evidence to back up the notion that she bore him an illegitimate son before dumping him for his best friend, thereby engendering the desolation of spirit that later found an outlet in novels such as Tess or Jude. To lumber Hardy with a supposed "dark secret", as Lois Deacon did in the 1960s, is to recast his life story in the "sensation" mode as practised by his acquaintance, Mary Braddon, or by Mrs Henry Wood.
Lois Deacon is put in her place by Pite, whose scrupulous and thoroughgoing approach to his subject has resulted in an adept analysis and estimate of all the available information. Some aspects of the life, however, contain contradictory or irreconcilable tendencies, which elude the biographer's wish to pin things down.
These were apparent from the start. Certain basic oppositions: tradition and progress, innocence and sophistication, freedom and security, fitting in and standing out, come into Hardy's perception of the world and his own role in it, and have a good deal to do with the particular time and place of his upbringing, and his position in society.
The son of a construction worker, he was born in 1840 in the depths of rural England - but at a time when the railway network was about to open up his native Dorset to the influence of a wider sphere. His birthplace was the tiny village of Higher Brockhampton, but only three miles away was the county town of Dorchester, where he went to school and later worked in an architect's office. By the time he was 21 he had moved to London to complete his architectural training, but already felt the pull of literature; it's tempting to trace this duality of aspiration back to the names of his grandmothers - one, Betty Hand, inclining him towards architecture, with the other, Mary Head, suggesting a more cerebral pursuit. It was some time, though, before the one profession was relinquished decisively in favour of the other.
Hardy's first London venture was over by 1867, when an unspecified illness drove him home to Dorset to recuperate. It was also around this time that his boyhood Christianity began to evaporate, to be replaced by an enduring agnosticism. Fed up with his job, bereft of his faith, unable to find a publisher for his poems, not noticeably lucky in love . . . no wonder Hardy turned for solace to his "innocent, vibrant country world" and immersed himself in writing a novel - though that too was doomed to be rejected, as the slow, painful course of gaining literary acceptance and credibility was got underway.
It was only with the publication of Far From the Madding Crowd in 1874 that Hardy's impulse to make himself into a chronicler of "hidden lives and neglected values" (Pite's phrase) chimed with public expectations: this was his first major success. Earlier, too, in that significant year, he had married Emma Gifford and the two had begun their restless trekking back and forth between London and Dorset, Surbiton, Sturminster Newton, Dorchester, Wimborne and all. Max Gate, the house Thomas Hardy designed and built on a plot of land not far from Dorchester, and in which he made his home from 1886 on, provided a welcome stability - though it also placed Emma close to Hardy's relatives, with whom she didn't get on.
The Return of the Native, which followed Far From the Madding Crowd in 1878, achieved nothing like its predecessor's popularity, and this backwards-forwards swing in public opinion became something of a pattern with Hardy's literary output. Readers who loved Tess, for example, were appalled by Jude the Obscure - though it's likely that few went as far as the Bishop of Wakefield, who flung the book into the fire and then, in a further access of outrage, dispatched the ashes to the author. Though he could, by this stage, afford to disregard unwelcome criticism, such incidents no doubt influenced Hardy's decision to give up fiction after Jude, and stick to poetry.
As an eminent literary personage, Hardy drew many disciples and visitors to Max Gate, and some of these have left a record of Emma's eccentricities - eccentricities which may have intensified in response to her husband's incessant infatuations. A series of attractive and - largely - unattainable young literary women lit up Hardy's life, while Emma grew stouter and greyer in front of his eyes. He'd always made fun of her taste in dress, but when, in later life, she reverted to the frills and feathers of her youth . . . one's heart sinks. Still, Emma was not cowed by Hardy, and neither was his second wife, Florence Dugdale, (nearly 40 years his junior), whom he married after Emma's death in 1912. Both wives were capable of evincing a sardonic detachment from the more aggravating aspects of domestic life with Hardy.
As a biographer, Ralph Pite is resolute rather than inspired, but his assiduous modus operandi and his judicious version of events suggest that this will become the standard life of Hardy. It's not a critical biography - well, perhaps enough has been said and conveyed on the topic of Hardy the writer - but it works as a portrayal of an era, an examination of contemporary mores, and a tribute to the depth and complexity of Hardy's literary achievement.
Patricia Craig is a critic, biographer and anthologist. Her Ulster Anthology will be published by Blackstaff in the autumn, and her biography of Brian Moore is available in paperback
Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life By Ralph Pite Picador, 741pp. £25 Patricia Craig