Syphilis and Mrs Hardy

Much agitation at the TLS today. Did Thomas Hardy's first wife die of syphilis?

“The moment when Thomas Hardy became a great poet”, according to Claire Tomalin in her new biography, was when his wife, Emma, died in 1912. That was when her husband began to write the “extraordinary elegies of tender, guilty, evanescent remembrance” that are among the greatest achievements of English poetry, according to Jonathan Bate in his review of Tomalin’s book in this week’s TLS. 

But could there have been a hidden reason for the guilt that is inextricably mixed with grief in these poems – one that is not mentioned by Tomalin or any of Hardy’s earlier biographers?

The cause of Emma’s death was given as “heart failure and impacted gallstones” by her husband’s GP. But, according to Robert Alan Frizzell, a retired medical practitioner also writing in this week’s TLS, this was most likely a cover-up.

Dr Frizzell’s “retrospective diagnosis” is that Emma’s death, and her various symptoms in the years before she died, were due to syphilis. His startling new interpretations of some of Hardy’s greatest poems chart the first appearance of symptoms, the progression of the disease, and the terrible rift that occurred in the marriage as Emma “withdrew all favour” from the husband who had most likely infected her.

“We know that Hardy had a weakness for pretty young women, and in the nineteenth century it was not necessary to be especially promiscuous to contract syphilis, just unlucky…. But however unlucky Hardy was, he was well aware that Emma had by far the worst of it.”

Comments

[ricardo]

Sir Peter, I disagree with "the moment when Hardy became a great poet" thing. Take "Ditty" for instance. Written in 1870,what a great poem! I wrote yesterday at my blog ( unfortunately, in Portuguese) that Hardy's choice of changing from novels to poetry, in my opinion, was due to his financial conditions in 1912 and 1913. And the reasons for the wreck of his first marriage were many. The shortage of love, what can you say about this ? Congratulations from a faithful reader.

[ricardo]

Sir Peter, did you get my comment about Hardy ? Or it was lost while you are moving ? Who can trust on internet or e-mails ? Sometimes you send a comment, but it is like a message in a bottle...

[Jonathan Mason]

It certainly has struck me before now that it is very likely that Hardy had relations with prostitutes during the years he was in London, when apparently he spent a lot of time away from home.

I came to this conclusion long before the syphilis theory was put forward, because it seemed to me that the most likely source of the character of Tess, a poor country girl raped and made pregnant by a rick man was some girlfriend from the London days.

Tess is written so passionately that one has to conclude that the story is based on a woman Hardy knew and cared about. Perhaps the secret was not the baby, but the syphilis.