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Peter Tait, Sherborne Literary Society

The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry

(Riverrun 2022) £18.99 (hardcover) Sherborne Times reader offer price of £16.99 from Winstone’s Books

In recent years, there have been several novels and plays written about Thomas Hardy exploring key moments in his life, including Damien Wilkin’s novel, Max Gate, a whimsical take on the aftermath of the death of Hardy, Christopher Nicholson’s novel Winter set around the infatuation of Hardy with Gertrude Bugler and Peter John Cooper’s She Opened the Door on the furore following the publication of Jude the Obscure.

It is not surprising, however, Elizabeth Lowry was drawn rather to the wonderful elegies of 1912-1913 that Hardy wrote for Emma (‘The Chosen’) following her death in 1912. It was a time of intense turmoil in Hardy’s life in which he was pining for his estranged late wife to the consternation and bewilderment of the next Mrs Hardy, Florence Dugdale, a subject rich in possibilities. From the outset, however, Lowry is keen to stress that:

The Chosen is a fictional, but I hope essentially true, impression of the days following the death of Thomas Hardy’s first wife, Emma in November 1912 and of Hardy’s writing of Tess . . . some twenty years earlier.’

In The Chosen, Lowry tells her story through a creative use of sources, including familiar (and sometimes substantial) quotations and extracts from letters, poems, novels, and diaries that she embeds in her narrative, serving to anchor her fiction to the accepted biographical narrative.

Where Lowry does let her imagination run is in imagining the entries from the diary of Emma entitled ‘What I think of my Husband’. Although the notebooks, the contents of which Florence described as ‘diabolical’, were destroyed, Lowry imagines them as less hostile, and in a rather unexpected denouement, even placatory. This is the opportunity for Lowry to offer an imagined hypothesis and she does it expertly, linking the diaries to the turmoil that was afflicting Thomas and its resolution. Of the other characters in the novel, we met a strident and protective sister, Kate, and her older sibling, Mary (whom Lowry boldly states that Hardy loved best of anyone); Emma’s mentally unstable niece, the annoying and cloying Lillian Gifford; and Hardy’s close friend and confidante, Edmund Gosse. There are a few more imaginative leaps of faith taken: Lowry gives Emma credit for the title and plot of Tess and sees the book’s success as the start of discord between her and Thomas, but overall, her narrative is always credible. Her descriptions of Max Gate, the setting for most of the narrative, and the domestic details she portrays, are superbly rendered.

At the end, Hardy, ridden with guilt and regrets by Emma’s unexpected death, is primed to work through the trauma by writing his wonderful elegies of 1912 - 1913. Lowry’s writing is beautifully paced and crafted and the book is hugely readable – a tribute to her consummate skill as a writer. Whether the novel is a true impression of what happened may be debatable but it is certainly highly plausible and deserves to be read by anyone interested in Thomas Hardy or in good literature.

petertait.org sherborneliterarysociety.com

Celebrating 10 Years as Sherborne’s Independent Bookseller 2012-2022 8 Cheap Street, Sherborne, Dorset DT9 3PX www.winstonebooks.co.uk Tel: 01935 816 128

Talk and Signing with Sophie Irwin

Tuesday 17th May

The Butterfly Room, Castle Gardens 6.30pm for 7pm Join us for a glass of wine to celebrate the launch of ‘A Lady’s Guide to Fortune Hunting’ by local author Sophie Irwin. A deliciously entertaining and sassy novel about women’s self-advancement in the 19th Century. Tickets £2 redeemable against the book, available from Winstone’s