The Chosen is Elizabeth Lowry’s new novel about the days immediately following the death of Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma, in November, 1912, and of Hardy’s writing of Tess of the d’Urbervilles some 20 years earlier. It’s also the story of how some of the greatest love poems in English, Hardy’s Poems of 1912–13, came to exist. Elizabeth describes reconstructing her characters’ inner lives, in particular Emma’s diaries.
When I began The Chosen I had a clear vision of an elderly man sitting at a writing table, after a lifetime’s success as a novelist and poet: Thomas Hardy at 72, surrounded by paper, dressed in the shabby trousers he likes to wear while working, warding off all interruptions.
He lives a separate life from Emma, his wife of over 40 years. For two decades she’s kept to herself in the attic rooms at the top of Max Gate, the big red-brick house in Dorchester which he built for her, while he’s worked in his study directly below.
Once she was intensely involved in his writing, acting as his copyist and daily support – not least in shaping the manuscript of Tess, the novel that made his name.
But their marriage has long been soured as he’s become more and more absorbed in his professional life, to the point where they rarely meet, and don’t speak. And now, quite unexpectedly, one November morning, Emma dies.
Stunned by her loss, Tom is forced to confront their many years of estrangement. In the days that follow, he’s tormented by conflicting feelings of guilt at his relationship with a much younger woman, Florence Dugdale, and a troubled longing for the Emma he once loved and courted – as well as by bewilderment at the mysterious cause of the bitter quarrel between them on the day before her death.
His perplexity only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled What I Think of My Husband… How will an anguished husband and poet, who has always found writing easier than living, respond?
The story of Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford began in the West Country, in 1870. While working as an architect, the 29-year-old Hardy was commissioned that March to make plans for the restoration of St Juliot Church near Boscastle.
When he arrived he was met at the rectory door by the rector’s blushing, high-spirited sister-in-law. This was his first sight of Emma.
Within a week they’d fallen in love. Emma would encourage Tom to pursue his dream of abandoning architecture in order to become a writer, defying her family to marry him, as he did his to marry her. The aching love poems Hardy wrote to Emma after her death in 1912 remembered and celebrated this heightened time – but only once it was too late.
The question that gripped me was: why did Hardy choose Emma Gifford as his wife in the first place? And how did a marriage that started with such high hopes go so wrong?
It appears that even more than her ‘rosy’ good looks and vivaciousness – Hardy remembered later that she was “the most living person” he’d ever met – Emma’s appeal for Hardy lay in the absolute faith she had in his literary abilities, and her love of literature itself. She wasn’t only an avid reader but had ambitions of being a writer too. Once she was Mrs Hardy, these all came to nothing.
Sadly, it seems that marrying Hardy turned Emma’s youthful enthusiasm for literature into a lifelong prison. She really did keep those diaries chronicling her dissatisfaction with the marriage: in two letters Florence Dugdale, who became Hardy’s second wife, records his horrified reaction at discovering them.
I imagine that Emma found the reality of the literary life hard to stomach: not just fitting around Hardy’s relentless work schedule, but having to take second place to the constant pressure of an absorbing vision.
The couple had no children. In the novel their childlessness, and the possible reason for it, becomes the agonizing focal point of her unhappiness. Emma must often have felt that in choosing her, Hardy had simply chosen to take literature to wife after all.
The difficulty for me, of course, was that most of this was conjecture. Hardy was a famously guarded man who seldom talked about his private life. And though Emma could occasionally be indiscreet, in her correspondence, about the trials of being married to an author, we’re unable to consult her diaries because Hardy took good care to burn them soon after he’d read them.
When reconstructing the diaries, I had to invent. I also had to be careful to take her seriously – to make her seem fey, perhaps, as we know from her reported conversation that she could be in life, but not foolish. Emma was no fool, and she’d plainly got the measure of her husband early on: of his ambition, and his sheer creative will.
On Hardy’s side, Emma’s whimsical charm and skittish energy later proved an irritation, and his friends and family gossiped indiscreetly that she was mad. Or was she just driven to distraction by his detachment and complacency?
What’s certain is that Hardy’s reaction to Emma’s death wasn’t what anyone expected. Florence assumed that he’d be relieved to be free. Instead, he shut himself away, and began an outpouring of love poetry unequalled in English literature for its candour and lacerating regret.
Emma haunted him. For a while the memory of her and the regret he felt turned him into a ghost in his own life. He looked for her incessantly, imagined he saw her walking in the garden at dusk, obsessed over every small detail of their early courtship.
In The Chosen we follow him as he has to re-evaluate his entire marriage and take responsibility for his share in its failure. Too late, he realises that he still loves his wife.
It’s not all gloomy. My favourite moment in the book is when Tom wakes one night and feels a dry leaf that’s blown through the open window brushing his palm. Just for a moment, he believes it’s Emma. “Emmie,” he says, “I thought it was you. I thought you’d come to tell me that at last you know.”
By the end of the book, perhaps, she does.
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry is published on 14 April, 2022. It’s available from Amazon and Bookshop.
See more about this book.
Elizabeth Lowry is a frequent contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, the Guardian, the Wall Street Journal, and other publications. Her second novel, Dark Water, appeared in 2018. It was longlisted for the 2019 Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and for the HWA’s Gold Crown Award for 2019. Elizabeth lives and works in Oxford.
elizabethlowry.co.uk
Twitter: @MElizabethLowry
Instagram: @melizabethlowry
Images:
- Detail of Thomas Hardy’s study at Max Gate: Elizabeth Lowry
- Emma’s attic at Max Gate: Elizabeth Lowry
- Watercolour by Emma Hardy of the Old Rectory, St Juliot: New York Public Library (public domain)
- Picture of Emma Hardy at Max Gate: Elizabeth Lowry
- Hardy’s manuscript of Poems 1912-13, Dorset County Museum: Elizabeth Lowry
