ESC: English Studies in Canada

Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: A Biography (New York and Toronto: Random House; London: Oxford University Press, 1982). xvi, 637. $25.00 Michael Millgate has written by far the most substantial life of Hardy, and we are unlikely ever to see another so full. It will undoubtedly be the stan­ dard biography henceforth, though it cannot be taken as the absolute authority on the significance of the details of Hardy’s life and their relation to his works. For, as Millgate is clearly aware, literary biography is un­ avoidably interpretive. Although at times he drops into the chronicling mood, where sequences of minor events are impressed upon the mind as being rather like David Copperfield’s “stout pale pudding . . . with great flat raisins in it, stuck in whole at wide distances apart,” for this reader, at least, the decision to provide as much detail as possible was the correct one, for the “raisins” of revelation and interpretation stand out all the more promi­ nently in contrast to the even mass of the narrative’s flow. Having trapped myself into a mixed metaphor — which I do believe conveys something of the effect of reading this biography, especially the later parts — I shall eschew further poetic pretensions and get down to facts. But the problem with “facts” in the long life of an author who took so much trouble, in the autobiography dictated to his second wife, to retain posthumous control over how that life should be regarded, is that they are both voluminous and elusive. The attempt some years ago to explain virtu­ ally everything in Hardy’s life and works after 1867 on the basis of a supposed love-affair with his cousin Tryphena Sparks (a theory that at least one critic has made the basis of a study of the works) strikes me as less the result of weak scholarship than of a desire for an unattainable certainty about one of the most enigmatic major figures in late-Victorian and early modern English literature. Robert Gittings’s two-volume life of Hardy (1975; 1978) is the only other biography that requires mention in a review of Millgate’s book. A viciously dismissive attack in the Times Literary Supplement on the Tryphena Sparks hypotheses seemed to me to foreshadow the rather sensational tone Gittings would adopt. His volumes are a “good read,” and some of his interpreta­ tions of aspects of Hardy’s life will remain worthy of attention. Yet on the matter of Tryphena, for example, Millgate, grinding no axes, commands greater assent when he suggests that during two years, since the cousins “were often alone together . . . it would not be extraordinary if they made love” (106) ; and yet he rejects on the basis of a lack of any reliable evi­ dence the idea that there was a child, or that the loss of Tryphena was some kind of emotional centre for Hardy’s subsequent life. And Gittings, despite his contempt for the unscholarly Tryphena-ites, himself commits an amazing extrapolation from the scantiest evidence, in claiming that a woman, 229 referred to in two of Hardy’s letters as was a special influence on Hardy in London from 1863 to 1865, is possibly the woman referred to in the bitter poem, “Neutral Tones,” and may even be a source for Sue Bridehead. Millgate has found — as he has found so much else — a probable identi­ fication of “H.A.” as Henrietta Adams, a friend of Hardy’s mother, and moreover presents strong evidence of an involvement with and possibly even an engagement to one Eliza Bright Nicholls from 1863 to 1867, a relation­ ship ending in part because of Hardy’s growing infatuation with Eliza’s sister Jane. In this, as in so many matters, Millgate draws upon documents not available to Gittings; and indeed, Hardy’s tendency to “fall in love” with one woman after another, well into his eighties, is made more vivid by the fact that Millgate is able to supply more names of such women at several periods than is Gittings. The assertion that Eliza Nicholls is the woman referred to in “Neutral Tones” may be Millgate’s interpretation of the facts, but it is...