Carole Angier
HE WEPT FOR TESS
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man
By Claire Tomalin (Viking 512pp £25)

Let's get the obvious question out of the way: do we need another biography of Thomas Hardy? Yes, we do. First of all, because Hardy is one of the most mysterious writers in English literature; and second of all, because this one is by Claire Tomalin, who always brings an acute and original intelligence to bear. Here she ranges herself with the calmer Hardy scholars, Michael Millgate in particular: no evidence for an affair with his cousin Tryphena, for example, or for a family model for Tess. She mops our brows, too, about Hardy's famous response to seeing a woman hanged. Did he find her still an attractive woman at the point of death? 'Only too likely, surely, but hardly culpable'; merely expressing the painful truth that she was young and beautiful, and at the same time dead.

Tomalin is above all sympathetic. She defends Hardy, here and elsewhere – as a great if uneven writer, and as a husband who, long into their unhappy marriage, still wrote affectionately to poor silly Emma, his first wife. And more than any other writer on Hardy, she defends Emma herself, and her successor, the revisionist Florence, as well. This ability to empathise with all three parties to a long and bitter quarrel is a rare achievement, and a proof of what biography can be at its best: a feat of understanding all sides, once the smoke of battle has cleared.

On the work, Tomalin agrees with Hardy's own assessment: poetry was his true love, and he compromised the novels by writing them too fast, for serialisation. Nonetheless, she argues – surely unchallengeably, by now – that he wrote at least three masterpieces, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and The Mayor of Casterbridge; and that there were striking characters and observations even in the failures. Her comments on the work are almost always insightful (though 'Reading Jude is like being hit in the face over and over again' misses the target for me; it is more like being hit over and over again in the heart). She makes Hardy's publishing history painfully gripping – the slow start, then the huge success, pursued to the end by censorship and bowdlerisation; and her accounts of Hardy's sufferings at the hands of Victorian reviewers quiver with horrified sympathy.

But Claire Tomalin is above all a biographer, and a great one. So she sets Hardy's life as a writer in the context of his life as a man; and that is where the real strength of her book lies.

Hardy was not interested in politics, but in character and landscape, and Tomalin follows his lead. She sketches in the social background, concentrating on the elements that touched Hardy: the pervasive poison of class, the tragedies of war. She lets Hardy himself set the sensual scene, quoting many beautiful and characteristic passages, such as the planting of pines in The Woodlanders: 'the soft musical breathing instantly set in, which was not to cease night or day till the grown tree should be felled’. Then, like Hardy, she concentrates on character.

Apart from landscape, Hardy's best subject was women. Elfride, Bathsheba and Tess are extraordinary creations, alive with Hardy's interest and sympathy, far ahead of their time; and one of Tomalin's best subjects is his relationship with women. She begins with his mother, Jemima Hands, 'powerful rather than tender, with [a] dark streak of gloom and anger', from whom Hardy got his love of reading, his ambition and (possibly) his pessimism. Then she draws the wives, in vivid detail. Her portrait of Emma in particular is a triumph both of research (since Hardy famously destroyed every scrap of their own records) and of writing. We see their romantic beginnings, when Emma thrilled Hardy's imagination – an educated lady, who yet rode her horse 'like one animal' over the Cornish cliffs. Then we watch as fate closed in: Hardy living in his books and his imagination (increasingly of other women) more than with her; no child to warm his heart and fill her days; Emma growing ever more angry, and ever more snobbish, scatter-brained, sadly absurd. In the end she attacked him, in her diaries and in front of friends; and when he received the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature from Yeats and Newbolt, he sent her out of the room.

Despite all this, Tomalin finds much to admire in Emma – courage, energy and determination (even to publish her own dreadful novel, which not everyone would welcome quite as generously). And despite all this too, when Emma died Hardy famously rediscovered his love for her, and wrote some of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. Tomalin opens her book with this paradox, and treats it with the same rare imaginative sympathy as she accords Emma herself. Hardy needed a muse more than a real woman, she shows, and his muse is what women wanted to be; he had no luck in ordinary love, and did not know how to be an ordinary loving husband. The best of Hardy's love for women went into his art: he and his wives all suffered, only his readers gain.

Last but not least, Tomalin gives us a rich but still enigmatic portrait of that old enigma, Thomas Hardy himself. His contradictions and ambiguities – between countryman and deracinated intellectual, between social conservative and artistic revolutionary, and above all between successful, active man and wounded soul – were essential to his art, and his art was the place where he found for them a delicate balance. She shows us an almost comically neurotic man, from boyhood on: a solitary who could not bear to be alone; a successful self-made man who was nonetheless given to anxiety and black depression, and whose works increasingly expressed a radical pessimism, a conviction that some dark force controls us, making a mockery of our wills. No one then or since could quite understand where this pessimism came from, since his childhood was secure, his adult life a series of triumphs, and his old age covered in glory. As his friend Gosse memorably put it: 'What has Providence done to Mr Hardy that he should rise up in the arable land of Wessex and shake his fist at his Creator?'

Claire Tomalin's empathy uncovers many slights and struggles, including a possible late discovery that he was an unwanted child; these, she suggests, in someone of Hardy's extraordinary sensitivity to humiliation and disappointment, made the unhealed wounds which inspired his art. This feels right, but not enough: as Tomalin herself recognises, when she answers Gosse by talking not of Hardy's own experience, but of the bitter division of the nation into rich and poor at the time of his writing. In fact her book shows that he was hypersensitive not only to his own sufferings but to others’, especially the humblest – women, animals, birds, trees. Thomas Hardy was just born, it seems, sensitive to the pain of creation; and that is why his books are at once so bleak and so warm. Or perhaps, as Tomalin suggests, it all started with his mother. She was the one with the unhappy childhood and balked ambitions, and she more than shared his pessimism and gloom. Perhaps it was his mother for whom Hardy wept, after all, when – as Tomalin recounts – he wept for Tess.