Courtship

Abstract This chapter is concerned with Thomas Hardy’s and Emma Hardy’s depictions of their courtship (1870–4), which mainly took place in St Juliot and the surrounding region in Cornwall. Hardy spent only about fifteen weeks with Emma on the Cornish coast, but these visits inspired numerous poems as well as many scenes in his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes. Poems assessed in this chapter include ‘Beeny Cliff’, ‘Under the Waterfall’, and ‘The Young Churchwarden’. It considers the impact of her alcoholic and mentally unstable father’s angry response to their plans to marry, and the poems of foreboding, such as ‘I Rose and Went to Rou’tor Town’, ‘Near Lanivet, 1872’, and ‘Where Three Roads Joined’, in which Hardy later responded to his curt dismissal by John Attersoll Gifford, who apparently called him ‘a low-born churl’. Although Emma later destroyed all the letters the couple exchanged during their courtship, much to Hardy’s regret, her memoir and his poems as well as extracts from his diary included in the Life are here collaged to tell the story of these four crucial years in Hardy’s career.