Woman Much Missed

Abstract This book explores the many poems that Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) wrote about his wife Emma Hardy (1840–1912). These poems were nearly all composed in the wake of her death. It opens with a detailed analysis of what poetry meant to Hardy, focusing on his concept of poetry as allied to romance and on his quest to portray in verse what he called ‘the other side of common emotions’. Subsequent chapters offer close readings of the poems inspired by his chance meeting with Emma in St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870, by their courtship on the Cornish coast, and by their famously unhappy marriage. Particular attention is paid to Hardy’s use of classical sources such as Virgil and Ovid and to his reconfiguration of the conventions of elegy. This book also reveals the extent to which various Hardy poems were inspired by his reading of Emma’s memoir, Some Recollections, and by her so-called Black Diaries, which contained bitter denunciations of both Hardy and his family. The ‘Poems of 1912–13’ sequence (published in 1914) contains many of Hardy’s best-known poems about Emma: Woman Much Missed offers fresh interpretations of these elegies, while also weaving them into accounts of the many other Emma-related poems in the Hardy corpus. It concludes with a consideration of his peculiar verse-play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923), which it reads as an attempt to incorporate into the poetic narrative of his life both Emma and his much younger second wife, Florence Hardy (1879–1937).