Thomas Hardy, Emma Gifford and Florence Dugdale

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Speaker 1: Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of I Heart Radio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. So Tracy, you and I both, like many high school students, had to read some Thomas Hardy had to read Yes, did read no oh um. And I I will also confess that though I have actually read a good bit of his work between that and and college, I've always had a really hard time connecting with a lot of it. Um. But when I first read about his life story, which is quite a while back, and especially his very different relationships with his first and second wives, I became kind of fascinated with his life story. Which was always my problem studying literature is that I would always be like, yeah, but I want to know about the writer and their foibles. Um. You guys have your interpretation party, but I'm going to be over here in biographies, Um, he goes with Thomas Hardy just like a lot of writers. Once you know about his life, a lot of his work becomes a little more interesting because he was clearly, very clearly working through his own stuff on the page while he was writing. So today we're going to talk about Thomas Hardy, but we are also going to talk about the two women who were very very central to his life, Emma Gifford and Florence Dougdale. So Thomas Hardy was born June second, eighteen forty in Dorset, England, and he was the first child born to a stonemason also named Thomas Hardy and Jemima hand Hardy. They had three more children after the younger Thomas was born. The family home was in a pretty remote area and living in these surroundings of this open heath land of Higher brock Hampton really left an impression on him. Uh, imagery of that kind of surroundings and upbringing that would come up a lot in his writings as an adult and as a young boy, Thomas got a pretty rudimentary education initially. Uh. He attended a village school for only a year that didn't even start until he was eight, in part because he was often pretty sickly as a child in his early years. But after that first year he then started attending school in Dorchester, which offered a much more structured curriculum. As a teenager, Hardy became an apprentice to an architect named John Hicks, This arrangement started when Hardy was sixteen and it lasted for about six years. When he was twenty two, Hardy made the move of more than a hundred miles to London to start a new job there. He had other career ambitions, which you will get to in a moment, but he thought that architecture would offer him a solid way to make and save up some money. So he had gotten his job as a draftsman working for the office of Arthur Blomfield. And at this point in Blomfield's career he was already well known and was president of the Architectural Association, but he had not worked on the projects that made him famous, including the Royal College of Music. Blomfield is another interesting one that we might talk about in the future. Hardy only stayed with Blomfield's firm for five years. He continued to have poor health, just as he had as a child, and it was determined that a return to the country would be best for his health, so he left his London job in eighteen sixty seven, although he did remain friends with Arthur Blomfield for the rest of his life. Like as we mentioned a moment ago, architecture really wasn't a job that Hardy considered his calling. He wanted to attend university and then become an Anglican priest, but in his years in London he had changed. He didn't have the religious zeal that he had had up through his early twenties, and because he had so many illnesses, he really hadn't been able to save up a lot of money, not what he would need to support himself through this planned higher education, so he turned to poetry. So this kind of seems like a man who may have felt desperate burying himself in his feelings in a way to express them. You don't normally go that life plan didn't work out. The only other option is to be a poet. But Hardy didn't really approach poetry that way at all. He basically kind of set this out as a goal for himself, and he really wanted to become a great poet, and he was very methodical about his approach about developing his work. So he worked on developing his own style and his own voice, and he did produce a number of poems and sent them to publishers, but none of those early works made it to print. Hardy's first novel, was The poor Man and the Lady, and he wrote that in the months after he left London. This was never published, though he shopped it around. Several publishers seemed interested in it, but ultimately they passed. The book hard he had written was about class division, as you may have guessed from the title, and the advice Hardy got was to work on making his writing more about the larger narrative and less obvious in conveying his sentiments on things. It was a little heavy handed, maybe inelegance, and this is really unsurprising considering that it was his first attempt. We do not really know how clunky or artful The poor Man and the Lady was, though, because some elements of it were integrated into later work, including a poem with the same name, but the writer destroyed the manuscript later in his life. Yeah, there were discussions after he got famous that he might kind of put it back together in some way, but that never happened. After taking all of those suggestions that he got from publishing houses to heart, though, hard he wrote another novel, this Desperate Remedies, and that was published in eighteen seventy one. Although initially hard He left his name off of it. When a new edition was published in eight he wrote a preface to it, acknowledging its tendency to lean pretty heavily on plot devices of popular fiction at the time writing quote. The following story, the first published by the author, was written nineteen years ago, at a time when he was feeling his way to a method. The principles observed in its composition are no doubt too exclusively those in which mystery, entanglements, surprise, and moral obliquity are depended on for exciting interest. During this time in Hardy's life and his early literary career, he was still working in architecture to make ends meet when he left London. First he went back to work with John Hicks and then moved on to a more lucrative position at the firm of G. R. Crick May. And it was in his architectural work that he was called to look at a church in Cornwall and to make a report on its condition. That was on March seventh, seventy. When he got there, the rector was in bed sick and the rector's wife was taking care of him, so the person who readed him was the rector's sister in law. Emma living at Gifford. They sat and talked, and Hardy was really smitten. Emma is often described as vivacious and smart as a whip, and for her part, learning that this architect's assistant also wrote fiction made him really alluring to her, and before too long they were courting. Emma became an incredibly significant figure and influence on Hardy's life and work, So we really want to make sure we take time to talk about her background here for a bit. She was born the same year as Hardy eighteen forty, although her birthday was several months after his on November. But aside from birth year, they had very very different starts in life. Whereas Thomas was the oldest child in the family, Emma was the youngest of five. She grew up in wealth in a house that prioritized intellectual pursuits. So though Hardy was working in a respectable job and offered Emma intellectual engagement, there was a very significant class separation between them, which persisted. She recorded in her account of their first meeting how shabby Hardy had looked. While they were first becoming a couple, Hardy was working on his book Under the Greenwood Tree that was published in eighteen seventy two, and it tells the story of the mill Stock Parish Choir and the people within it. But his next work, called A Pair of Blue Eyes, was obviously deeply influenced by Emma's presence in his life. The same year that Under the Greenwood Tree was published, which was initially anonymously, Hardy was asked to contribute a monthly fiction serial to Tinsley's magazine. That fiction was A Pair of Blue Eyes, and Hardy took a big leap of faith with that assignment because he decided that he was going to leave his architecture job and work on fiction full time. That was starting in about the middle of eighteen seventy two. This meant that he was giving up his steady income without much promise of a few sure. Tinsley's magazine was fairly new, having been established in eighteen sixty seven, and it was subheaded as Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Light Literature. The owner, William Tinsley, had had some success in the magazine and publishing field, but it also been known to mismanage money just terribly and had gone through several bankruptcies before founding Tinsley's magazine, but soon another literary magazine, Cornhill Magazine, also asked Hardy for a serialized story, and this resulted in Far from the Matting Crowd, Hardy's famous pastoral novel about Bathsheba, Everdeene and the Three Men Vuying for her Love. Cornhill had a much larger readership than Tinsley's, and Hardy's work developed a following through this publication. The serialized story was published in book form in eighteen seventy four, and it established so many of the hallmarks of Hardy's work. It is said in Wessex, where many of his fictional works take place, in juxtaposes the idyllic surroundings against the challenges and difficulties of life. That same year it was published in book form, Thomas Hardy married Emma Gifford. Their courtship had been going on for four years at that point, and Thomas had made regular trips to visit Emma in Cornwall since their first meeting, and this was no small feat. He actually had to take four different trains just to get there, which was something that Emma called the nights move because of its similarity to chess. Any time that he traveled to Cornwall for work, he spent as much time as possible with Emma, and they would take long walks together. She also wrote about how he would um She would ride her horse slowly and he would walk alongside, and they would just go for miles, which is quite charming. One story goes that a walk that took them to Tintagel Castle had them so moony over one another that they didn't even notice that the castle was closing to visitors for the day, and they ended up locked in. They got out of the castle only after they waved their handkerchiefs at people outside in the cove below the castle, and then someone came to unlock the doors. But though they had clearly established their devotion to one another, this marriage was vehemently discouraged by their families. There were very real concerns that this class difference between them would prove to be too difficult to overcome. Emma's family thought that she would be marrying down. Hearty's family thought that he could never keep a spouse who had been raised in that kind of privilege really happy. But the two of them, they did not listen to their family's wishes. They got married on September four, and then they went on a honeymoon in France. The marriage was not quite what either of them had anticipated, and we will talk about that after we have a sponsor break the Hearties first several years of marriage were a little bit no matic. They stayed primarily in London, but they moved from home to home, and during this time Thomas Hardy's output was a little bit hit or miss. He was writing, and he was writing consistently, but the quality was not consistent. In eighteen seventy six he published a comedic commentary on social conventions titled The Hand of Ethelberta. This had also been a serialized piece for Courthnhill magazine following the success Afar from the Matting Crowd, and it's about a young woman who grew up poor than married a wealthy man who dies before Ethelberta is even twenty one, leaving her a very well off widow. She then takes up a writing career while hiding that her family is working class and choosing a second husband from several suitors. This is generally considered Thomas Hardy's weakest work, but in eighteen seventy eight he started another novel, which began as a serial, this time publishing in the fiction magazine Bell Grava. This work, The Return of the Native, was much better received than the Hand of Ethelberta, but it still didn't get the kind of critical praise that Far from the Matting Crowd had. Like his other work, you can see him echoing the things that he was experiencing in his personal life. The novelists set in Egdon Heath that's the Hearty's fictional part of Wessex, and it tells the story of Eustacia Vai who finds herself in an unhappy marriage to clym Yeobright, who's a native of the area and the person referenced in the title. So that unhappy marriage was likely informed at least to some degree by what was playing out in the Hardy Home, because right from the beginning of their life together, Emma had been unhappy, as basically everyone who knew them predicted would happen. She did not particularly enjoy living in London. For example, she couldn't go horseback riding, which was one of her favorite activities in Cornwall, and she did not really like being a writer's wife, even as and perhaps a specially as that writer became famous. Emma was so enchanted by Thomas talking about his efforts to become a writer when they first met, because she also wanted to be a writer, but he was not especially supportive of her efforts in her own writing, and he seemed to be pretty dismissive of it. In the early eighteen eighties, Hardy turned out three more novels, The Trumpet Major in eighteen eighty, Ala to Sean in eighteen eighty one, and Two on a Tower in eighteen eight two. The Trumpet Major was set in eighteen o four and tells the story of a romance that plays out against the backdrop of Napoleon's army invading. Two on a Tower is the story of a woman who falls in love with an astronomer, only to have that romance obstructed. The most different of these books is a Lao to Sean, which Hardy worked on while he was really sick and thought he might not live the story of a woman who inherits a castle and hires architects to work on it, and then finds herself a acted to each of them. We don't know for certain what illness Hardy was dealing with at this point, but later in his life he said it was bladder inflammation. In eighteen eighty three, the Hearties moved to Dorchester, in southern England, not far from where Thomas had grown up. This was once again intended to bolster his health, particularly after he had gone through that illness while writing, but there had also always been this distinct awareness when they were in London that he had grown up in a far lower social class than most of the people he knew and his wife, so he was probably kind of eager to leave for that reason as well. In Dorset, Hardy acquired a plot of land and designed a home for it, which was called max Gate. His brother, who had followed in their father's line of work, did the stonework for max Gate, and so for the first time, after a decade of marriage, the Heartys had a home that was theirs, not a rental, and all of that nomadic moving around London was over. In eighteen eighties six, Hardy published The Mayor of Casterbridge, and this book reflects his new life in Dorchester. The writing includes pieces of the place's history interwoven into the fictional plot, and it also has locations from around Dorchester used as settings for various events. The mayor referenced in the title is the character of Michael Henchard, who had become the mayor of Casterbridge after having grown up in a life of poverty and being a laborer. Hardy's next novel was The Woodlanders. This book published in eighteen eighties seven, after having run as a series in McMillan's magazine. It is once again a critique of class divisions and makes clear that it has become all too common for people of higher social status to be lauded as great, even though they are often morally corrupt, while honest, good people of lower social standing are not afforded the same praise. That whole book is set in the timber industry and a family business. After The Woodlanders, Hardy published a collection of some of his short story which had appeared in various magazines over the years. This was titled Wessex Tales. He published several similar collections and the remaining years of his career. In eighteen ninety two, Hardy had worked on a serialized story titled The Well Beloved. A sketch in Temperament actually had a different title initially, but that's what it's known for these days. But unlike his other serialized works, it was not published right away as a novel. The book, whose protagonist falls in love with a woman and then with her daughter, and then with her granddaughter, is very critical of marriage. It was eventually reworked, possibly because Emma was unhappy at the thought of the original being novelized, and it was released as the last of Hardy's novels in eighteen ninety seven, but was not the last he had written. In eighteen ninety one, Tessa the Derbervilles was released as a three volume novel after running as a serial in the magazine Graphic. This novel is considered one of his best. It relays the story of a young woman named Test derby Field, whose father discovers he's actually descended from a noble family, the Derbervilles. Tests is sent to the Derberville mansion to make their case, and the derby Field family hopes that these wealthy Derbervilles will confer a fortune upon Tests once they realize they're related. But Tess is seduced by a son of the family and gives birth to a child who dies as a baby. Her life continues to unravel from that point and she's just stuck in a life that has no hope at happiness and that leads her to desperate action. This novel was originally criticized for the perceived immorality of the main character, although Hardy's intent was to show a woman who was victimized by a social hierarchy and the power that hierarchy allows people to wield to the ruination of others. In Hardy published his most bleak work, to the Obscure ass is once again a significant element and a driver of the story, with the titular character of Jude wanting to pursue higher education but instead having to become a stonemason. He is also lured into an unhappy marriage and then is abandoned by his wife and falls in love with his cousin, Sue, who marries another man in her own unhappy match. The two Jude and Sue eventually lived together as a couple, but as they are unmarried, there are a lot of obstacles that come up in their lives. The Danue mole of this book is ultimately unhappy, and like Tests, the book was criticized for encouraging immorality. It is also today considered one of his best works. The harsh criticism of these two novels is sometimes mentioned as a possible reason why Hardy went back to his first literary love of poetry after publishing Jude the Obscure. Though he had turned to serial fiction and novels as a way of making a living as a writer, he had always continued to write in After finally publishing his much edited Novelization of the Well Beloved, Hardy published his first book of verse, which was titled Wessex Poems. It had a preface that read, quote of the miscellaneous collection of verse that follows. Only four pieces have been published, though many were written long ago and others partly written. In some few cases the verses were turned into prose and printed as such, it having been unanticipated at that time that they might see the light. This book seemed to critics almost a curiosity. Hardy had illustrated the book himself. He also makes a note in the preface that like oh, those illustrations might not have anything to do with the text, they're just there um. And while some of the poems are very straightforward, others are verse fiction, much of a historical For example, of these two variations, one is titled to a Lady offended by a book of the writers, and it opens with now that my page up closes, doomed maybe never to press thy cozy cushions more, or wake thy ready yays as heretofore, or stir thy gentle vows of faith in me. In contrast, the poem Leipzig, which has the date eighteen thirteen as a subtitle, is set up with a scene note at the beginning quote the master Tradesman's parlor at the Old Ship in Casterbridge evening, and it features a German character known as Old Norbert who relays a story about his mother's life. During the late eighteen nineties, I kept finding various dates Emma moved into the attic at max Gate, making it her own sort of apartment. They actually had work done to make it like a cute little livable space, and she would take her breakfast in lunch there when she was not out or entertaining. She did continue to have dinner downstairs, although at this point her marriage with Thomas was more or less non existence in terms of the two of them having a real and shared life together. Several years later, in nineteen o three, Hardy started publishing an epic poetic drama titled The Dinasts. It's a drama, but one that was never intended for the stage. Set during the Napoleonic Wars, that first volume alone contains six acts and thirty five scenes. The writing uses historical events as the framework to tell the stories of the people impacted, as well as to offer up commentary by spirits and intelligences. In nineteen o five, Hardy had a meeting with a young woman named Florence Emily doug Dale at max Gate. This was a significant meeting, and we are going to talk about Florence after we hear from the sponsors who keep stuff you missed in history class going. That meeting between Thomas Hardy and Florence Dugdale had been initiated as a fan letter. Florence wrote to Hardy and said she loved his work and would love to visit him. And he wrote her back and he said sure. He only asked that she sent a card a day or two ahead of time to give him notice. Florence would later relay this story as though it was Mrs Hardy she was supposed to meet at max Gate, although why she altered that story as a matter of speculation. She also told several different versions of how she and Emma would have met to support that. Even her siblings all got different versions. Apparently none of those were true. Um Florence was a writer of children's books as well as a local theater critic, and she had greater literary ambitions. Hardy claimed, after having talked to her a couple of times, that he needed research assistance for the rest of the Dynasts, and she was enthusiastic about helping him. Florence was in her mid twenties at the time she was born on January twelfth, eighteen seventy nine. Her father, Edward Dugdale, was the headmaster of St Andrew's National School for Boys. Florence was well educated and trained as a teacher, which was her primary vocation. Writing was her side job. She taught at her father's school, just as he had been with Emma. Hardy was quite taken with Florence. He wrote and published a poem titled After the Visit, which opens with the stanza, come again to the place where your presence was as a leaf that skims down a drowsy way, whose ascent but dims the bloom on the farer's face. The poem goes on to note the smell of the flowers in the air, the beauty of the changing colors of the clouds, and quote the large, luminous living eyes regard me in fixed, inquiring wise as those of a soul that wade scarce consciously the eternal question of what life was. Yeah later in life, when he republished that poem, he wrote a subhead that it was to F. E. D. S. So at that point everyone knew it was for her. For the next several years, Florence became more and more ensconced in life at max Gate, although she was living in London, so traveling back and forth to Dorset was actually a lot. She served as a research assistant, a friend, and eventually an editor for both of the Hearties. Uh Emma was writing her own novels for a bit, including one that is about a woman who is the muse for all of her husband's work. A lot of autobiographical stuff going on in their writing. There has actually been a great deal of speculation about whether or not Florence and Thomas started up a romantic relationship during this time. Depending on the biography you read, people will say with certainty what they think it is as though it is fact, but we don't really have any evidence. They were certainly very close and they spent a lot of time together, and they even traveled together to visit hearties friends, but we don't know anything with certainty. It does appear that Emma didn't know that Florence was helping Thomas at first. Florence had introduced herself to Emma at a lecture that Emma had given at the Lyceum Club, and the two had become friends. And for a while this was a tenuous situation because each spouse thought Miss Dougdale was their friend. There was some competition and even fights over it. This seems like a super healthy dynamic. Oh my goodness, listen, I have thoughts from the behind the scenes um. In nineteen eight, Thomas Hardy was offered a knighthood and he turned it down. The reasons for this decision are a little unclear. There is one speculation that is kind of the salacious version, that had he accepted the knighthood, it would have made Emma Lady Hardy and given her a title which she would have enjoyed, and he declined just to prevent her from having it. We do know that he made that decision without talking it over with his wife. But Hardy was also again the entire idea of honors like knighthoods, and it's just as likely that he turned it down because he didn't want to appear like one of the villainous people of privilege in his many novels about classism. He did, however, accept the Order of Merit In, perhaps because that particular award was in recognition of persons who quote may have rendered exceptionally meritorious service towards the advancement of art, literature, and science, so it would have felt less like a class related honor and based truly on his own achievement. In late nineteen twelve, Emma Hardy was unwell. She had been an avid cyclist for years, but she started to find that her rides were just too taxing. She hired a maid named Dolly, who was fourteen. Dolly was a great comfort to her. She didn't seem to mind carrying meals and other necessities up and down the stairs to the attic. Emma refused to have a doctor visit, and Thomas dropped the subject, but by the end of November she was no longer interested in food. She visited with some friends on November twenty five, that was the day after her birthday, and they saw that she was unwell, but they chalked it up to depression. On the twenty six Emma consented to have a doctor visit that she did not agree to a physical exam. The doctor thought she had made herself unwell by refusing to eat, and she died the next day. At this point, the Hardys had been married for thirty eight years, although about half of that most people would say was fairly estranged. After Emma died, Thomas discovered a manuscript called Some Recollections, which was a biography about her life up until her marriage, and another work titled What I Think of My Husband. Parts of Recollections were actually incorporated into an autobiography that Hardy worked on later, and he is said to have burned What I Think of my Husband after reading it. Over the years, the exact role of Emma Hardy and the nature of her personality have in the focus of a lot of theorization and discussion and presumption. Some friends of Hardy described her in tremendously negative ways. Those descriptors have stuck around through the years. They're often repeated, but also considered as though their fact, with no context for their larger relationship. Hardy's family his sisters in particular, were known to tell people all kinds of damaging things about Emma. She has been described as snobbish, spoiled, and even crazy, as jealous and ridiculous, but it's been pretty rare for historians to really look at her life and seek out what she was actually like. She was, for example, a vocal advocate for animal rights, and she was active in the anti vivisection movement. She wanted reforms for the poor, to improve the education of underprivileged children, and she wanted teachers to be in quote an exalted position. She was also deeply invested the suffrage movement, and she was known to throw spectacular parties at max Gate. Hardy himself seems to have recognized after Emma's death that their estrangement was not solely her doing. He mourned not just for her, but for having lost what they had when they met at thirty and became really infatuated with one another. Some of this suggests that he just never came to terms with either the idea that a person is never the idealized version that you may have in your head, or the notion that people grow and change. He had wanted the Emma he believed her to be when they married, and then finding out she might be anything other than that was something he had never really made space for. Additionally, Hardy was known to at minimum flirt a lot with other women, sometimes in long drawn out series of correspondence, and just as we can't know for certain if things ever became physical or otherwise inappropriate it in his relationship with Florence while Emma was still alive, we also don't know with certainty if he ever had affairs with anyone else. In an article written by Jane Thomas in the Hearty Society Journal, in the writer sums up the situation in this way quote, there is evidence that Emma was difficult, embarrassing, irritating, demanding, childish, aggressively, religious, and perhaps even a trifle mad towards the end. There is also evidence that she was disappointed, neglected, discouraged, excluded, pushed aside, and suffered very much whatever she might have gained for being the partner for the best part of forty two years of a famous man who was married to his work and with whom she had looked forward to an active creative partnership based on mutual love of literature. It can be pretty easy to assume that Emma and Thomas Hardy lived entirely separate lives by the time she moved into the attic, but she had actually been doing a lot of the kinds of work that Florence Dugdale started doing. Throughout her husband's career. She had, for example, kind of done all that secretarial stuff and helped with research and and helped keep all of his contracts in order. And Emma had begun to feel, whether justified or not, that she had done a lot of work to support her husband's career over the years, and that she had gotten nothing in return. She had, according to Hardy's own admission, been the one to decide that he should give up architecture and take the risk of a life of writing. And the years after Emma's death, Hardy's output was significant, and his regret over their life together was a significant motivator for that output. He told a friend that many of those poems had simply come to him after Emma died, saying quote one looked back through the years and saw some pictures. One of those poems was After a Journey, in which he writes, in part quote, yes, I have re entered your olden haunts at last, the places where you often used to go through the years, through the dead scenes. I have tracked you. What have you now found to say of our past? Viewed across the dark space wherein I have lacked you. Summer gave us sweets, but autumn wrought division. Things were not lastly as firstly well with us, Twain you tell, But all's closed now despite time's derision. I see what you were doing. You were leading me onto the spots we knew when we haunted here together often used to go the waterfall above which the mist bow shone, and the then fair hour in the then fair weather, and the cave just under, with a voice still so hollow that it seems to call out to me from forty years ago, when you were all aglow, and not the thin ghosts that I now freely follow. After a Journey and many other poems about Emma were public is in nineteen fourteen as a group called Poems of nineteen twelve nineteen thirteen. That book came out after Hardy had married Florence Dougdale, who moved into max Gate shortly after Emma's death. Later, Florence would say of the retrospective love poems Thomas had written to Emma, quote, all the poems about her are a fiction, but a fiction in which their author has now come to believe. Various biographers have characterized Florence as not really in love with her much older husband, but definitely in a state of deep admiration for his work. But that's changed a little in recent years due to several letters that came to light in twenty These letters were written to a former student named Harold Barlow at various points in his life. The verse was written in February nineteen fourteen, when Barlow was in Africa. Florence wrote, quote, perhaps you have read, if you have the English papers, that I am now the proud and very happy wife of the greatest living English writer, Thomas Hardy. Although he is much older than myself, it is a genuine love match on my part, at least, for I suppose I ought not to speak for him. At any rate, I know I have for a husband one of the kindest, most humane men in the world. She also shared with Barlow her chagrin at their marriage being a matter of public interest, writing quote, accounts of me and my portrait have been printed in every paper I think in England, I have been shown in the cinematograph, written about all over America and Europe. I am tired of this publicity. Since Barlow was not someone with a platform to publicize these personal missives, there appears to be no motivation to write so lovingly of Hardy, unless she just meant it. The two of them lived together seemingly, very happily for the next fourteen years, during which Hardy wrote every single day. In December of Hardy developed pleurasy. When he was sick for several weeks. On January eleven, his doctor visited in the evening, and then after the physician left, Hardy had a heart attack and died. Florence wrote to Harold Barlow again several years after Hardy's death, telling her friend and former student quote, I am writing this late in the evening, alone in the room where I first met my husband. A little French bulldog is snoring by the fire. He is my faithful and generally my only companion. I thank you for your kind words. Of sympathy about my great loss. It was such a wonderful thing to live in close association with that great mind and that noble personality. After having lived fourteen years with such a companion, it is little wonder that I feel intolerably lonely and find the world very empty today. Max Gate is part of the National Trust and it's open to the public. Oh, Thomas Hardy in your marriage is Um that was a little bit of a longy. So I actually have a different thing than listener mail, which is just that I wanted to mention that we recently did our first live stream and we had wonderful people that got take us to it and had like a very lively chat going on the whole time, which was beautiful to see. And then you and I got to do calls with a number of people, several dozen people afterwards, and it was just really really wonderful and sort of reinvigorating. And um, I I knew that I had really been missing live shows, but like it brought into incredibly sharp focus how much I missed connecting with everyone. So I want to thank everyone who was part of that and Loop Live because they were great to us. It was just such a fun night and I am eternally grateful, and I just wanted to say that if you would like to write to us, we'll do I'll do listener mail again in the future. I just wanted to get all that out. You could do so at History Podcast at i heart radio dot com. You can also find us on social media as missed in History And if you would like to subscribe to the show, that is a simple, simple procedure. You can do that on the I heart radio app or really anywhere you listen to your favorite podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of I heart Radio. For more podcasts from I heart Radio, visit the I heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.