ABSTRACT
Emma Hardy It was a lovely Monday evening in March after a wild winter we were on the quivive for the stranger, who would have a tedious journey, his home being two counties off 1 changing trains many times and waiting at stations – a sort of cross jump-journey, like a chess-knight’s move. The only damper to our gladness was the sudden laying up of my brother-in-law by gout, and he who was the chief person * Some Recollections by Emma Hardy, Thomas Hardy’s First Wife, ed. Evelyn Hardy and
Robert Gittings (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), pp. 33-7. Hardy met Emma Lavinia Gifford (1840-1912), his first wife, on Monday, 7 March 1870. Emma was born in Plymouth on 24 November 1840 into a genteel middle-class family. Both were just under thirty years old when they met, and Hardy was not yet an author, his first novel having been rejected the previous year. Hardy was working as an architect in Dorchester and had been sent to begin the restoration of the church of St Juliot in North Cornwall. The Vicar, Caddell Holder (1803?– 82), had recently married as his second wife Helen Catherine Gifford (d. 1900), and Emma helped her sister with the housekeeping. After the courtship which Emma describes here, they were married in London on 17 September 1874 at St Peter’s Church, Paddington, by Emma’s most distinguished clerical relative, her uncle Edwin Hamilton Gifford (1820-1905), Canon of Worcester. The only other member of either family in attendance was Emma’s brother, Walter, who gave her away. After Emma’s death in 1912, Hardy found this manuscript entitled ‘Some recollections by E.L. Hardy’; it is about seventy pages in length and contains some 15,000 words, written on lined leaves of exercise-book paper. Its final page was dated 4 January 1911 and it seems to have been written in the previous six months. It is an autobiography of her childhood and youth and it stops, as does this extract, at the time of her marriage. Hardy also found among her effects some ‘diabolical diaries’, as Florence Hardy called them, which Emma had begun in the early 1890s and in which she denigrated Hardy and his family. The effect on Hardy of also discovering the recollections, as Robert Gittings suggests in his introduction, ‘can scarcely be exaggerated. Shocked by the diaries and their revelation of Emma’s mental state, shattered by remorse at his neglect of her physical state, he was intensely moved by this almost idyllic picture of her upbringing and their courtship, containing only the most slender and vestigial hints of later disaster’ (p. xiv). Hardy made some emendations in his own hand on her manuscript, in black and red ink and in pencil, and the most significant ones are given below in footnotes. Emma’s spelling and grammar have been retained.
