Thomas Hardy - An Imaginative Woman

I recorded much of the archive Thomas Hardy material shown on BBC4 recently and it's providing a fine resource for when none of the hundreds of TV channels are showing anything better than an Only Fools and Horses that one is almost word perfect in parts of. 

I've got and have read The Collected Stories if not every single one of the novels but I read them in later life, not aged about 15 or 16 when I read The Woodlanders which I recall in all its detail as if it were yesterday, so An Imaginative Woman rang no bells whatsoever. 

Starring Claire Bloom, it featured a lady somewhat dutifully married who finds herself staying in rooms temporarily vacated by her favourite poet, a Romantic looking sort called Robert Trewe. Now, I've been besotted by the work of a few poets before if not necessarily the poets themselves but never, I think, to such an extent.

The story is in the book upstairs, for sure, but memory of it I had none despite its deeply profound implications and, unavoidably in Hardy, desperate outcome. I cannot recommend it too highly and we will see one day if a re-read puts it anywhere near The Dead at the apex of the all-time prose fiction list.

As ever, it comes with the caveat that we can treat the 'art' and the artist as separate entities and avoid conflating them. The difference between how Hardy treated women in his writing compared to in life is vast but we would have to disqualify an awful lot of a lot of awful people - the majority of them men, I dare say - that produced seminal artworks in all genres that cultural history can't be written without reference to.

I'm not entirely convinced Shakespeare was anywhere near the worst of them, though. Not for writing The Taming of the Shrew, not for the deal his wife got from his will and not even for the disgust at female sexuality one can find evidence of in the plays. They aren't items one wants on one's 'woke cred' CV but they have for the most part been answered.