Hardy Women by Paula Byrne review – brilliant writer of women, very bad husband

If only I had the talent, I would write the play. The year: 1910, or thereabouts. The scene: a gloomy drawing room in a large country house, through whose windows the audience is able to see the reason for the murk in the form of a veritable forest of dark and brooding conifers. The cast comprises three main characters: a celebrated writer with white hair, an unusually big head and a beaky nose; his elderly wife, whose clothes, like her manner, are eccentric; and a much younger woman, a companion and typist whose careful warmth barely covers the ruthlessness beneath. Minor characters include a devoted housemaid with a doll-like face, and two grand, male literary visitors, whose bitchy gossip about the household will one day be preserved for all posterity.

I would call it Max Gate, which is the name of the house Thomas Hardy (our famous writer) designed and built in 1885, living there until his death in 1928. In 1910, the atmosphere inside this brick villa was intense and peculiar. Hardy and his wife, Emma, were by now deeply unhappy, a state they’d endured at least since the publication of his last great novel, Jude the Obscure, in 1895; secreted in an attic, Emma was busy writing the diaries that would provoke such guilt in Hardy once she was dead, an account of his badness as a husband. Whether this badness encompassed the fact that he’d recently fallen for yet another younger woman, our typist Florence Dugdale, is moot: rather cleverly, Florence had befriended Emma, which had given Hardy licence to install her in Max Gate as his secretary. But either way, the mood was pretty extraordinary. In 1912, by which time Florence had departed for a period after a terrible marital row, Edmund Gosse and AC Benson (my cast list’s literary figures) came to visit. By their telling, Hardy was silent and frail, and Emma was quite possibly mad.

Both men were struck by the fact that a novelist who wrote so well about women had made such an unhappy marriage, a surprise Hardy seemed half to share: “I wonder how I came to write like that,” Gosse recalled him as saying. Personally, I’ve always been, well, surprised at such bewilderment when it comes to Hardy. The imagination is a powerful thing. Writers may do all sorts on the page that they cannot do in reality; like all of us, their wisdom, available to other people, does not always extend to their own lives. But for the biographer Paula Byrne, as for Gosse and Benson, apparently only so much can be put down to imagination. How is it, she wants to know, that while a female fan could write to the creator of Bathsheba Everdene, Tess Durbeyfield and Sue Bridehead praising him for his “complete understanding of a woman’s soul”, his first wife could only rail at the way he reserved his sympathies exclusively for those females he invented? Drawing on Hardy’s correspondence, including some letters that were, Byrne says, unknown to previous biographers, she sets out in her new book to find answers by looking closely at all the women in his life – and I do mean all of them. Not only are his wives and lovers, his sisters and his mother here. At moments, it feels like every woman he ever met is between these pages: a neighbour, a schoolteacher, a girl at a harvest supper.

I admired Byrne’s last book, a life of the writer Barbara Pym, and hoped to feel even more enthusiastic about this one. If I loved poor old Hardy’s novels as a weepy teenager, in middle age, his life, an extended drama of longing and class angst, fascinates me. But while Hardy Women is deeply researched and often well-written, it is, unfortunately, one of those books that struggles to rise above its tricksy, completist concept. Chop-chop-chop, we go, through all the women, each chapter devoted to a different one, save for those few that return, by necessity, to a creature we’ve already met. The effect, in narrative terms, is frustratingly stop-start, and (unintentionally, I think) repetitive. Occasionally, we lose sight of Hardy altogether, and when this happens, the book, in need of a thread, takes on a desultory air. Things are further muddled – or perhaps I mean stalled – by the fact that its middle section is devoted entirely to his female characters.

The biggest problem, however, stems from the fact that the most fascinating period by far of Hardy’s life in terms of his relationships with women is the one with which I began this review: those months and years when he was in a complicated and deceitful menage with Emma and Florence. Of course it’s sad to see how he used his cousin Tryphena Sparks and a woman called Eliza Nicholls, who arrived, Miss Havisham-like, at Max Gate after Emma’s death in 1912, still in possession of the engagement ring he’d given her 40 years before – and Byrne tells both stories beautifully. But still, the reader waits – and waits – for Florence to appear and then collide with Emma, and you have to get through an awful lot of pages before she does (Hardy Women is long).

Is it worth the wait? I’m not sure. If I’ve read about it before, I was nevertheless intensely absorbed by it here, the details still so strange. Before she died, Emma worried she would be murdered, like Dr Crippen’s wife; no sooner had Florence become the second Mrs Hardy in 1914, than her 80-year-old husband developed the hots for a teenage actress, Gertrude Bugler, whom he believed to be the very embodiment of his beloved Tess. But still, Byrne can’t solve the mysteries of this sad tale. No one will ever be able to do that. Was Emma mad, or did the knowledge that Florence was her rival turn her mind? If I lean towards the latter explanation, it’s not only feminism that pushes me there. I think of the poems Hardy wrote about her after her death. Their beauty is so extreme. My heart tells me his guilt was well founded.

• Hardy Women: Mothers, Sisters, Wives, Muses by Paula Byrne is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply