His disappointment turned to anger, and he says he threw the manuscript into a box and declared he might as well give up the struggle to become a writer. It was Emma who urged him to stick to writing, believing it to be his true vocation. Her attitude touched him deeply. He saw that she was prepared to ‘set herself aside altogether – architecture obviously being the quick way to an income for marrying on’ and decided he must think of her interests, which meant earning enough for them to marry and ignoring her selfless advice.15 That winter he gave the best of his energies to architecture.
So things continued for another six months, Hardy and Emma exchanging letters, Hardy working through Christmas and until Easter for Crickmay, when he decided to go to London again and was given a job assisting an examiner for the Royal Institute of British Architects. News of his cousin Tryphena was that, having finished her treacher training at Christmas, she had applied for and got a position as headmistress of a primary school in Plymouth, with a salary of £100 a year. She was twenty, Hardy nearly thirty-two. If Hardy knew, or reflected on, their relative situations, he may have laughed.
But now things began to change. In April he asked Tinsley for an account of his earnings. Tinsley invited him round, gave him various small payments and wanted to know if he had anything else to show him. He remembered that Hardy had indicated in the autumn that he had another book planned. Hardy wrote home for the manuscript of Under the Greenwood Tree. Tinsley read it in a week and made an offer of £30 for the copyright. It was an outrageously low offer, but Hardy accepted. The copyright remained with Tinsley and his successors until after Hardy’s death.
He corrected the proofs of Under the Greenwood Tree late at night, after his day’s work. It was published on 15 June 1872 in two volumes, anonymously again, and immediately well reviewed, with especial praise for its freshness and originality. Tinsley now needed a serial for the magazine he put out monthly, and asked Hardy if he had anything else; Hardy agreed to let him have ‘A winning tongue had he’, although he had only five chapters completed. The first instalment had to appear in September, which meant he had to give up all his other work and turn out copy as fast as he could, but he was being paid £200.
In this way Hardy began his long career as a writer for serialization, which paid so much better than book publication at first. He renamed his current project A Pair of Blue Eyes and took the manuscript with him when he set off for Cornwall in early August, this time making the journey by sea, aboard a mail packet boat leaving from London Bridge; the voyage gave him useful copy for the serial. This time he was going to meet Emma at her father’s home, Kirland House, near Bodmin, and he asked to have the next set of proofs sent there. Professionally, his star was rising at last, and he felt he could go confidently to Mr Gifford and speak of his wish to marry his daughter. He already had an idea for another novel which was to be Far from the Madding Crowd.
Nobody who was at Kirland House when Hardy and John Gifford met ever described or discussed what happened, but the upshot was that Hardy left the house and never communicated with either of Emma’s parents again. Plainly Mr Gifford, on meeting him and learning of his family background, refused to countenance his marriage to Emma. He seems also to have made some accusations against him, because Hardy later used the word ‘slander’ without explaining further.16 This absolute rejection by Emma’s parents, attributable entirely to class snobbery and kept up for the rest of their lives, was another wounding humiliation that had long-lasting effects. For Emma it was a blow, painful no doubt, but nothing was going to deflect her now. She showed her spirit, ignored her father’s outburst and appears to have left the house with Hardy. They went to stay with old friends of hers, the Sergeants – Captain Charles, his wife, Jane, and their children – at St Benet’s Abbey in Lanivet, and from there they went on to St Juliot. The Holders, who took a different view of Emma’s romance from John Gifford, made them welcome, and Hardy was given Mr Holder’s seal of approval by being invited to read the lessons in St Juliot Church, morning and evening, on Sunday, 8 September. This may have given him some private amusement, but it was important to have someone in her family ready to countenance their engagement.
Hardy said later that when Emma was living in Cornwall ‘and playing the harmonium in the church she had no religious opinions whatever – was, in fact, an Agnostic’.17 It is his only mention of her indifference to religion in the days when he first knew her, and, if it was so, it would have been an important secret bond between them. She may have been influenced against religious belief earlier by her father’s ‘secular quotations and remarks’ and encouraged further in this direction when Hardy talked to her about his freethinking ideas, or she may have simply wanted to please him by agreeing with them.18 Living in a rectory, she naturally conformed to religious observance, and not only by playing the harmonium. In one of the few fragments he quoted from a letter of hers later in 1872, she speaks of believing what she can’t understand in the Bible ‘in a lump of simple faith’, which does not exactly suggest agnosticism.19 It looks as though she fluctuated between belief and disbelief, now influenced by Hardy in one direction, now reverting to the conventional norm and the prayers she learnt as a child. Later in life she returned to her mother’s Low Church Protestantism and decided to be shocked by Hardy’s atheism, which may be why he felt it worth recalling her earlier lack of faith.20
Hardy stayed on at St Juliot until mid September, absorbing the details he needed for the setting of his novel and consulting Emma on points of womanly behaviour and etiquette. The first instalment had already appeared in Tinsleys’ Magazine, anonymously but ‘By the Author of Under the Greenwood Tree and Desperate Remedies etc.’, and he had to keep going fast. But he was writing well and confidently, with the comfortable thought that he had another good novel gestating in his head. When a letter came from Professor T. Roger Smith at the Institute of British Architects offering him more work in his office, he decided he could afford to refuse it.
This was the turning point in his professional life. He had made the leap into being a full-time writer. He was thirty-two, and he knew it might not last, but it was a great moment. He went home to Bockhampton and was able to give himself up entirely to writing. Under the Greenwood Tree got a good short review in the Spectator in November, and there was a stirring of interest in the literary world. Later in the month the editor of the Cornhill magazine, Leslie Stephen, asked Moule for Hardy’s address and wrote to him saying ‘it was long since he had received more pleasure from a new writer’ as he had from Under the Greenwood Tree, and asking him if he would like to do a serial for the Cornhill. Hardy wrote back explaining that he was busy at present but outlining his idea for a novel about a young woman farmer, a shepherd and a cavalry sergeant. Stephen approved and suggested a meeting, but for the moment Hardy held back. He had been invited by Holder to Cornwall for Christmas and the New Year, and naturally accepted.
After Christmas with his beloved he was home in Bockhampton, writing steadily. In March he sent off the last instalment of A Pair of Blue Eyes, and in May it was published in three-volume form by Tinsley Brothers, for the first time under his own name. It is a book that charms the reader from the start, with its setting – the wild northern coast of Cornwall – and its heroine, Elfride, the daughter of the parsonage who writes her widowed father’s sermons for him and lives as free as air, riding when and wherever she likes on her horse, and busily composing a romantic novel when she is not enjoying Tennyson. She is wooed by a young visiting architect, Stephen Smith, who at first impresses her father as a gentleman and is then rudely turned out of the house when it appears he is merely the son of a builder. The resemblance to Hardy’s own Cornish experiences is obvious, but A Pair of Blue Eyes is only passingly autobiographical, because Stephen leaves for India and faithless Elfride meets and prefers his older friend and mentor, Henry Knight. The scenes between Elfride and her two successive lovers are wittily done, and Elfride is well drawn, a clever, impetuous and independen
t young woman who yet allows herself to be subjugated by the older, highly educated and pompous Knight. He gives as his opinion of women that the best thing to hear about one is ‘not that she is writing but that she has married, after which you hear no more about her’ – a view shared by many Victorian men. To Hardy’s contemporaries, Knight, with his insistence that a young woman may not be intellectually aspiring and must be chaste, seemed like a sensible fellow, but Hardy’s own view was certainly closer to the modern one. In fact, Elfride can be seen as a predecessor of Tess, a woman cast off for no good reason by a lover who does not deserve her.
The book also contains one of the most surprising scenes in Victorian fiction. Knight slips on a cliff edge, along which he and Elfride have been walking in the rain, and finds himself clinging by his fingers and likely to fall to his death while she thinks how to rescue him. She is clever and bold enough to take off all her underwear, tear it into strips and make it into a rope to drag him back to safety. When he is safe, they embrace, full of relief and joy, but she is so embarrassed by her nakedness under a damp dress that she runs off home without him. He is left observing how very small she looks minus the usual layers of underclothing – ‘small as an infant’, he thinks. Hardy was raising a question which must have puzzled many young men at that time: what was the real shape and size of a fashionably dressed young lady? It was one no other writer of the period felt able to consider, and Hardy’s readiness to do so shows what an original approach he had. The book bogs down into too much plot, as serialized novels tended to, but it is fresh enough to let you see why two poets, Tennyson and Coventry Patmore, said it was their favourite among Hardy’s novels.
The reviews were generally good, some excellent. This did not prevent Horace Moule’s brother Charles writing to Hardy – who had perhaps asked his advice – with the classic suggestion that he would be wiser to keep up some sort of steady professional work. The postscript to his letter is a fine example of social anxiety and snobbery rolled into one: ‘I trust I address you rightly on the envelope. I conjectured that you wd prefer the absence of the “Esqre” at Upper Bockhampton.’ What did this mean? That Hardy could not be a gentleman at his parents’ house, whatever he might achieve in the world? Essentially, Charles Moule was backing John Gifford’s view of things. It helps us to understand what Hardy had to take on in battling his way towards acceptance in middle-class society. The Moules were friendlier than the Giffords, but the note of patronage was always there. Horace Moule also sent an ineffably condescending letter, however well meant his correction of the cast list Hardy had placed at the start of A Pair of Blue Eyes: ‘Why would you put Spenser Hugo Luxellian a Lord and not Spenser Hugo, Lord Luxellian… Mind – I’ve read next to nothing as yet. P.S. You understand the woman infinitely better than the lady – and how gloriously you have idealized here and there, as far as I have got. Yr slips of taste, every now and then, I ought to say point-blank at once, are Tinsleyan.’21 Hardy made the correction to Lord Luxellian, but the Moule superiority was losing its power to crush now that he was beginning to be successful in England and about to be published in the United States for the first time. In June, Under the Greenwood Tree appeared from the New York firm of Holt & Williams. It was serialized there the following year, and Hardy rose swiftly to popularity with the American reading public.
The year continued well. He and Emma made plans to meet in June in Bath, where she would be staying with an elderly lady friend, Miss d’Arville, who could chaperone them. Before that he delivered a few finished chapters and an outline of more of Far from the Madding Crowd to Leslie Stephen. Hardy was in London for a few days and dined with Moule, who was going to work as a Poor Law inspector in Ipswich. They agreed to meet in Cambridge in five days’ time. Hardy’s brother Henry joined him in town for a few days of sightseeing. Then Hardy made his first visit to Cambridge, where he had once thought of applying as a student. It was an intense experience. Cambridge is so perfect architecturally, the colleges placed along the river with their green courts and gardens, that it can seem more like a dream than a real place. Term was over, and Moule was in rooms in his old college, Queens’, in the heart of the town, between the river and the main street, King’s Parade. Hardy was given a guest room, dined in hall and had a glimpse of the privileged academic life. It was 20 June, midsummer, flawless weather:
By evening train to Cambridge. Stayed in College – Queen’s [sic]– Went out with H.M.M. after dinner. A magnificent evening: sun over ‘the Backs’. / Next morning went with H.M.M. to King’s Chapel early. M. opened the great West doors to show the interior vista: we got upon the roof where we could see Ely Cathedral gleaming in the distant sunlight. A never-to-be-forgotten morning. H.M.M. saw me off for London. His last smile.22
Hardy went happily on to Bath, where Emma awaited him, and they explored the city and its surroundings, going to Tintern Abbey and the Wye Valley, Chepstow and Clifton, during their ten days. Miss d’Arville did not feel obliged to accompany them, but Emma had to be returned to her house every evening. One night Hardy sat up on Beechen Cliff, overlooking Bath, through the short hours of darkness – ‘Last eveglow loitering in the sky.’ He thought of her in the sleeping city below, and how he would like to ‘walk the world’ with her, and how she matched ‘the maddest dream’s desire’ – and wrote a poem saying so.23
9. Easy to Die
From Bath he went home to Bockhampton and settled down to write Far from the Madding Crowd. It is the warmest and sunniest of his novels. He tells us that some of it was written out of doors, on scraps of slate or stone, pieces of wood and even dead leaves, which is hard to imagine – how much can you write on a dead leaf? – but also absurdly appropriate to the rural setting of the book, and the storm scene was actually written during a night of thunder and lightning.1
It is a near-perfect mid-Victorian romance – Hardy intended it to be a contemporary story – with a heroine who challenges Victorian assumptions about young women through her natural energy. Bathsheba Everdene is autonomous, active, prepared to choose her own men and possessed of a strong erotic will of her own, characteristics usually allocated to bad women in nineteenth-century fiction. Several contemporary critics took against her: Henry James thought Hardy’s depiction of her ‘vague and coarse’, and Andrew Lang found himself unmoved by her ‘character and mischances’ and thought she was not a ‘firmly designed character’.2 Perhaps they missed the originality of some of the ideas Hardy makes her express, among them ‘it is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs’ – an idea hardly heard about again until the late twentieth century – and disapproved of her ‘I hate to be thought men’s property.’3
Although everyone in the parish where Bathsheba settles thinks she speaks like a lady, she is not a lady but the daughter of a country tailor, several times bankrupted and now dead. She has had some education but was considered ‘too wild to be a governess’.4 She is quite capable of running the farm she inherits from an uncle, and she is brave and bold, in contrast with her meek, passive, crushed rival in love, Fanny Robin. Bathsheba rides a horse with pleasure, not wearing a riding habit or using a side saddle like Elfride but astride ‘in the manner… hardly expected of the woman’, and is able to perform the acrobatic feat of dropping ‘backwards flat upon the pony’s back, her head over its tail, her feet against its shoulders and her eyes to the sky’ as she rides beneath some low branches.5 She also has the courage to open the coffin in which the dead Fanny has been laid, prising it open herself, because she wants to know whether there is a baby inside beside her rival.
Bathsheba is intelligent, playful and vain. At the start of the book both Hardy and his hero, Gabriel Oak, adopt a gently patronizing masculine stance towards her, but it is soon blown away. She feels herself entitled by her beauty, her position and her character to assert her own will in most matters. ‘ ’Tis the toss of the head, the sweep of the shoulder, and the dare of the woman in general’ is
how one of her labourers sums her up, adding, ‘she said a man’s Damn to Liddy when the pantry shelf fell down with all the jam-pots upon it.’6 When she finds her bailiff stealing, ‘She flewed at him like a cat – never such a tom-boy as she is.’7 At the corn market, she argues, holds to her own prices and persistently beats down the prices of other farmers, winning their respect.8 Love makes her lose her command and good sense, and she is chastened by her own mistakes but not defeated. Hardy does not condescend to her, as he does to Fancy and to Elfride, but instead seems to feel with her, giving her an irresistible intensity. Bathsheba starts as a girl and becomes a woman; she suffers and blooms at the same time. Some of the glow of his love for Emma is there in the writing, and you may wonder if he is offering her a picture of what he most admired in a woman: strength, high spirits, passion, and the power to recover from setbacks and mistakes. Bathsheba, with her dark eyes and hair, and her red jacket, careless of convention and in charge of her own life, is plainly not Emma, but at the same time she shares some of her enthusiasms, notably horse riding – something Hardy himself had never mastered.
If the setting was meant to be contemporary, the criticism it provoked was justified: that it painted much too pleasant a picture of farming conditions in Dorset in the 1870s. Hardy presents rural events and tragedies – the sheep driven over the edge, the ricks on fire, the dishonest bailiff – and shows a hiring fair where Oak fails to find work; but, as Andrew Lang remarked in his review, ‘The country folk in the story have not heard of strikes, or of Mr Arch; they have, to all appearance, plenty to eat, and warm clothes to wear.’9 When Joseph Arch, who travelled round England organizing agricultural workers into unions, visited Dorset in 1873, he found ‘the condition of the labourers in that county as bad as it very well could be’.10 The early 1870s were a low point for agricultural workers all over England. Arch attended the Dorchester Candlemas Fair in February 1873, and Hardy heard him speak, either then or on a similar occasion. Arch spoke again to an assembly of nearly 1,000 men and women on Fordington Green, against the system of hiring labourers by the year.11 In his own account of his experiences, Arch wrote that
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