The Chosen
November 1912. On a cold, wet autumnal morning, Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma dies suddenly of heart failure. With both born in 1840, and hence already past the three score years and ten, Emma’s death nevertheless comes as a colossal shock to the celebrated writer. Theirs was a notoriously difficult marriage, and Thomas Hardy’s bereavement and early days as a widower, with the complicated emotions and the often bizarre and terrifying changes and sensory disruptions that loss can bring to the suffering individual, are laid out with literary finesse and understanding.
The depth of his feelings for his wife come as a surprise to Hardy and others. In some ways, Emma haunts her husband. A number of female relations descend upon Hardy after his wife’s death, as well as Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman he was most close to, who acted as his secretary and companion. Hardy discovers Emma’s journals and reads her excoriating entries about him. This comes as a huge blow to Hardy, but it does not lessen the loss that the feels.
While the real Emma Hardy did keep a journal, her widower burnt them soon after her death, so their contents are authorial conjecture, but Elizabeth Lowry captures well Emma’s voice and convoluted attitude to her husband and to the puzzling question of existence.
The reader is pulled between sympathy for the old man, who could either be considered to have been shackled to an emotionally fragile and demanding wife or treated her with cavalier disregard and emotional deprivation. The writing is at times intensely literary, and Lowry’s metaphors and similes are quite original. There are some phrases that would probably not be spoken in early 20th-century England, and the author is surely mistaken to have swarms of flying ants in early December, even in balmy Dorset!
