Thomas Hardy (25 page)

In November 1902 Emma, in another reference to Hardy, declared:

I fear I am prejudiced against authors – living ones! – they too often wear out other’s lives with their dyspeptic moanings if unsuccessful – and if they become eminent they throw their aider over their parapets to enemies below, & revenge themselves for any objections to this treatment by stabbings with their pen!
¹¹

This comment by Emma leaves no doubt that she was aware Hardy was making, what she considered to be, disparaging allusions to her in his writings. Meanwhile, her criticisms of him continued unabated. In April 1910, for example, she stated:

I have my private opinions of men in general & of him in particular – grand brains – much ‘power’ – but too often, lacking in judgment of ordinary matters – opposed to
un
selfishness – as regards them
selves
! – utterly useless & dangerous as magistrates! [which Hardy was] & such offices – & to be put up with until a new order of the universe
arrives
, (IT WILL).
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As far as Christianity was concerned, it must have been a source of great regret to Emma, who had been brought up in a church-going family, and whose mother ‘read the Bible with exceeding diligence’, that her husband did not share her beliefs. Nevertheless, her faith was undimmed, for in January 1911 she commented that ‘an Unseen Power of great benevolence directs my ways;I have some philosophy and mysticism, and an ardent belief in Christianity and the life beyond this present one. Outward circumstances are of less importance if Christ is our highest ideal.’
¹³

Emma donated money to various Christian charitable institutions, including the Salvation Army and the Evangelical Alliance. Also, it was her habit to have pamphlets printed, which she left in local shops or at the homes of people she visited. The purpose of these ‘beautiful little booklets’, as she described them (in her own, somewhat ungrammatical language), was to ‘help to make the clear atmosphere of pure Protestantism in the land to revive us again – in the
truth
– as I believe it to be’.
¹⁴
As might be guessed, Emma was fervently anti-Catholic.

It would be easy to dismiss Hardy’s diagnosis of Emma’s condition as ‘madness’ simply as sour grapes on his part. She refused to have a sexual relationship with him; he would therefore revenge himself by denigrating her character. But Hardy was not the only person to realise that there was something fundamentally awry with his wife’s make up. For example, Hardy’s fellow author, Mabel Robinson, writing of Emma in the spring of 1891, said that her ‘thoughts hopped off like a bird on a bough’.
¹⁵

Christine Wood Homer of Athelhampton Hall, a friend of the Hardys, described how one day, when she (Christine) was a girl, Emma arrived at her house and asked if she might see her pet rabbits, guinea pigs and birds. Instead of looking at any of the animals, Emma ‘spent the whole time watching the flies on the window panes’ and expressing ‘enthusiastic delight at the sweet way in which they washed their little faces and stroked their pretty wings’. When Christine was aged 16, Emma invited her to accompany her by train on a visit to Parkstone, to see a friend who had ‘an aviary of foreign birds’ in her garden. They arrived at the friend’s house and viewed the birds together. Then Emma, ignoring Christine altogether, withdrew to the drawing room, where she and her friend read poetry to one another. When it was time to catch the train home, Emma travelled first class and left Christine to travel third class.

If a visitor arrived at Max Gate, said Christine, and Emma suspected that the person had ‘no interest in or friendship for her, but had come only to see Mr Hardy and worship at his shrine’, she would not inform her husband of the presence of that visitor, who would go away ‘without seeing his hero’. Emma ‘would have liked to have received the admiration of the world for talents she believed she possessed’. But, according to Christine, the poems Emma wrote were ‘indifferent’, and as for her talents, they were ‘not discernable to anybody else’. Christine states that Emma ‘had the fixed idea that she was the superior of her husband in birth, education, talents, and manners. She could not, and never did, recognize his greatness.’ (In other words, Christine believed Emma suffered from delusions in respect of her abilities. This possibility will be discussed shortly.)

In summary, Christine described Emma as ‘a peculiar woman, and in many ways like a little child’;but whereas at first ‘she had only been childish, with advancing age [she] became very queer and talked curiously’. Finally, said Christine, it had been ‘a burdensome grief’ to Hardy that Emma ‘had not cared for any of his family’.
¹⁶

It was not only friends, acquaintances and employees who remarked on Emma’s bizarre behaviour, but also her own relatives. For example, ‘Leonie’ (Leonora Randolph) Gifford, Emma’s second cousin, visited Emma in 1910 on an occasion when a visitor of some importance was expected for tea. The visitor failed to arrive, but despite this, Leonie was offered no tea herself.
¹⁷

Lorna Heenan was the daughter of Dr Frederick B. Fisher, who (until he retired in 1910) was Hardy’s medical adviser. Lorna states that Emma’s ‘mental condition progressively deteriorated, with a consequential increased strain on her husband. [Also, her] “heretical” outbursts in the local papers caused her husband great embarrassment.’
¹⁸

As for Dr Fisher, he was of the opinion that Emma was ‘the cause of much of the great man’s pessimism and depression’.
¹⁹

Evelyn Evans was the daughter of Mr Alfred H. Evans: by day a chemist, but by night a producer of Hardy’s plays for the Dorchester Debating, Literary and Dramatic Society. Evelyn, who from an early age had been taught to ‘reverence’ Hardy, described the ‘mauve, satin ribbons’ that used to wave from Emma Hardy’s bonnet as she bicycled around the town. ‘She was considered very odd by the townspeople [of Dorchester],’ said Evelyn, who would ‘touch their foreheads significantly as she went by, free-wheeling … with her feet off the pedals’.
²⁰
According to Evelyn, during Emma’s latter years:

her delusions of grandeur grew more marked. Never forgetting [that] she was an archdeacon’s niece who had married beneath her [a reference to Emma’s uncle, the Revd Edwin Hamilton Gifford, Archdeacon of London, who had conducted her marriage ceremony], she was heard to say in front of guests, ‘Try to remember, Thomas Hardy, that you married a lady.’She persuaded embarrassed editors to publish her worthless poems, and intimated that she was the guiding spirit of all Hardy’s work.
²¹

Edward Clodd described the ‘absurd’ way in which Emma dressed as reminiscent of some nymph in a picture by Botticelli. (Clodd’s assertion is amply borne out by contemporary photographs taken of Emma.)

Florence Dugdale described witnessing a heated quarrel which occurred between Hardy and Emma one Christmas Day. Hardy wished to take Florence with him to Bockhampton to visit Mary and Katharine. Emma resisted the idea on the grounds that Hardy’s sisters would poison Florence’s mind against her.
²²

Sir Newman Flower declared that Emma became ‘eccentric’, and ‘would leave an open copy of the Bible [permanently] on the dressing-tables of the guests’ bedrooms’, even though the page might be ‘thick with dust before the next visitors arrived’.
²³
In her behaviour, she exhibited ‘a mild form of religious mania’.

The writer A.C. Benson and Edmund Gosse visited Max Gate together in September 1912. Benson, who had not met Emma before, described her as:

A small, pretty, rather mincing elderly lady with hair curiously puffed & padded [and] rather fantastically dressed. It was hard to talk to Mrs H. who rambled along in a very inconsequential way, with a bird-like sort of wit, looking sideways & treating my remarks as amiable interruptions.

As Emma showed him, ‘in a curious peering way’, the drawing room at Max Gate, she talked ‘in a hurried voice, as if she was thinking aloud and not regarding me at all’. In the garden, Emma became obsessed with pinching the pods of the plant
noli-me-tangere
(yellow balsam) in order to make them eject their seeds. ‘Mrs Hardy got entirely absorbed in this & went on doing it with little jumps and elfin shrieks of pleasure.’

The visit to Max Gate, said Benson, left him with:

a melancholy impression. It gave me a sense of something intolerable the thought of his [Hardy’s] having to live day & night with the absurd, inconsequent, huffy, rambling old lady. They don’t get on together at all. The marriage was thought a misalliance for her, when he was poor & undistinguished, and she continues to resent it.

As for Hardy, said Benson: ‘He is not agreeable to her either, but his patience must be incredibly tried. She is so queer, & yet has to be treated as rational, while she is full, I imagine, of suspicions & jealousies & affronts which must be half insane.’
²⁴

In July 1913 Edward Clodd visited Max Gate, where he was introduced to Hardy’s brother Henry, whom he described as ‘a well-set, sensible man’, and his two sisters, whom he described as ‘ladylike, refined’ and ‘well-informed’. However, Clodd remonstrated with Hardy for allowing his ‘half-mad wife’ to deny his family – ‘these well-bred folk as well as his mother [Jemima]’ – access to Max Gate.
²⁵

On 25 November 1914 Emma’s cousin, Kate Gifford, wrote to Hardy thus: ‘Emma and I met at my Brother’s at Blackheath not long before her death & I was so glad to see her again. It must have been very sad for you that her mind became so unbalanced latterly.’
²⁶

The conclusion is, therefore, that Emma had a significant mental health problem, which, as members of her own family acknowledged, became progressively worse as the years wore on.

In addition to the sexual problems experienced by Hardy during his marriage to Emma, There are signs that inother respects all was not well. This was apparent to Hardy himself, for time and again in his writings he alludes to the fact that Emma is, in his view, suffering from some kind of mental disorder. For example, on 17 December 1912, when he wrote to Florence Henniker, he referred to ‘certain painful delusions’ which Emma ‘suffered from at times’.
²⁷

In April 1913, after Hardy had visited him at his home in Aldeburgh, Suffolk, Edward Clodd recorded in his diary: ‘Met Hardy … [He] talked about his wife. She had illusions that she was being followed by some man, that people were conspiring against her: all showing the mad strain in the family blood.’
²⁸
In other words, Hardy was aware that not only Emma, but some other members of her ‘Gifford’ family, had mental health problems. The full extent of these problems will be revealed shortly.

Clodd also recorded that he had been told by Hardy of ‘the illusion nursed [by Emma] that she had written his novels because he got her to copy his MSS [manuscripts]’.
²⁹
In both of these instances, Hardy was describing not ‘illusions’ (misapprehensions of the true state of affairs), but ‘delusions’ (false beliefs) in his wife Emma.

In March 1914 (by which time Emma had been dead for sixteen months), Hardy wrote again to Florence Henniker to tell her that Emma’s mind ‘during her latter years … [was] a little unhinged at times, & she showed unreasonable dislikes’.
³⁰
In November he sent Emma’s cousin, Kate Gifford, a copy of his newly published collection of poems,
Satires of Circumstance: Lyrics and Reveries
, ‘not because I think you will care for a large number of them, but because it contains some that relate to Emma’. And he went on to tell Kate:

In later years an unfortunate mental aberration for which she was not responsible altered her much, & made her cold in her correspondence with friends & relatives, but this was contrary to her real nature, & I myself quite disregard it in thinking of her.
³¹

Hardy absolved Emma of all blame in regard to her condition. Given the fact that Hardy and others had made such observations about Emma, the question is, how can her condition be explained (given the fact that she did not seek medical help and therefore no professional diagnosis was made at the time)?

Modern-day psychiatrists divide such so-called ‘personality disorders’ into various categories:

Paranoid
– Commencing by early adulthood, sufferers exhibit ‘a pervasive distrust and suspiciousness of others such that their motives are interpreted as malevolent.’
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Histrionic
– Commencing by early adulthood, sufferers exhibit ‘a pervasive pattern of excessive emotionality and attention seeking’. They are ‘uncomfortable in situations in which he or she is not the center of attention’.
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Narcissistic
(otherwise known as ‘egomania’) – Commencing by early adulthood, sufferers exhibit ‘a pervasive pattern of grandiosity, need for admiration, and lack of empathy’. They have ‘a grandiose sense of self-importance’, are ‘preoccupied with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love’, believe themselves to be ‘special and unique’ and that they ‘can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people’. He or she requires ‘excessive admiration; lacks empathy; is unwilling to recognize or identify with the feelings and needs of others; is often envious of others or believes that others are envious of him or her’. Such a person may display ‘arrogant, haughty behaviour or attitudes’.
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