Thomas Hardy was always fascinated by women. While in life his relationships were often fraught and unhappy, through the heroines of his novels we can see into his soul.

These fictional characters, usually drawn in part or whole from women he knew, garnered our sympathy as they entered the difficult world into which Hardy cast them. In this respect, he was ahead of his time in challenging traditional attitudes to the plight of women in such questions as marriage, divorce, feminism, incest and lesbianism.

Throughout his life, Hardy nurtured close female friends, though at the expense of his two often neglected and humiliated, long-suffering wives. His mother, Jemima Hardy, exerted a possessive, domineering influence on young Thomas which would endure throughout his life.

His relationship with his sisters and female confidantes, meanwhile, shows us how Hardy viewed women and what he expected from them.

This book assesses the influence of Hardy’s closest female friends and family on his life and his work and looks at how his response to them moulded his creative genius.

Hardy, it would seem, fell in love easily. A glance or a word from a pretty woman would merit a poem. Letters and photos would follow. But neither of his marriages was truly happy. Perhaps the only women he was destined to love without qualification were the ones he would create – Tess, above all.

Peter Tait is a New Zealander who has lived in England for the past twenty years. A long-time aficionado of Thomas Hardy, his interest was rekindled when he came to live in Dorset in 1998. He has written several books, the most recent being novels based on the lives of Thomas Hardy’s two wives, Emma (Emma: A Woman Betrayed) and Florence (Florence: Mistress of Max Gate) as well as contributing a preface to the autobiography of Littleton Powys.

He has spent most of his life in education, as a teacher and headmaster and has written and spoken extensively on many educational issues in various magazines, websites, books and in the national press.

As an historian, Peter Tait has a keen interest in the history of Empire and of the Pacific, the subject of his next book, as well as environmental education as a trustee of Operation Future Hope which is dedicated to teaching children about ecology, re-wilding and climate change. He lives in Somerset with his wife Sarah, also a writer (Heart of Resistance, The Bookshop Dragon).

Imprint: Halsgrove. ISBN 978 0 85704 349 8, hardback, 234x156mm, 186 pages. Published October 2020.