One Wednesday morning in November 1912 the ageing Thomas Hardy, entombed by paper and books and increasingly estranged from his wife Emma, finds her dying in her bedroom. Between his speaking to her and taking her in his arms, she has gone.
The day before, he and Emma had exchanged bitter words — leading Hardy to wonder whether all husbands and wives end up as enemies to each other.
His family and Florence Dugdale, the much younger woman with whom he has been in a relationship, assume that he will be happy and relieved to be set free. But he is left shattered by the loss.
Hardy’s bewilderment only increases when, sorting through Emma’s effects, he comes across a set of diaries that she had secretly kept about their life together, ominously titled ‘What I Think of My Husband’.
He discovers what Emma had truly felt — that he had been cold, remote and incapable of ordinary human affection, and had kept her childless, a virtual prisoner for 40 years. Why did they ever marry?
He is consumed by something worse than grief: a chaos in which all his certainties have been obliterated. He has to re-evaluate himself, and reimagine his unhappy wife as she was when they first met.
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry is published in paperback on 13 April.
The Chosen has been shortlisted for the 2023 Walter Scott prize.
Elizabeth has written about reconstructing Emma’s diaries for Historia.
