In 2018 I had the privilege of interviewing Elizabeth Lowry following the publication of her second book Dark Water. Afterwards I asked her if I could interview her for her next book. She agreed. And now in 2022, once again, I have the honour of interviewing Elizabeth Lowry again on the publication of her new book The Chosen. Huge thanks to Elizabeth for giving her time so generously.
A new book from you is always a treat. My anticipation was manifest physically on occasions! And you’ve presented us with The Chosen, a consideration of the marriage between Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford, precipitated by the sudden death of Emma. Can you tell us a little about the initial motivation for choosing this as a subject for a novel?
Thank you, Gill. I was thinking a lot about marriage, and the writing life, and how the two are supposed to co-exist. On the one hand, you’ve agreed to share your days with another human being. On the other, you’re committed to holing yourself up in your study for hours on end, ignoring them, writing about people and things that don’t exist. Don’t they mind? Well, of course they do, eventually.
I’ve read and re-read and loved Hardy’s novels and poems for a long time. The poetry he wrote to Emma after her unexpected death in November 1912 is astonishing in its nakedness of expression and the depth of its regret and self-blame. They’d been married for nearly forty years, but for the last twenty or so they’d lived separate lives at Max Gate, the villa on the outskirts of Dorchester which he’d built for her. They had separate bedrooms; they met nightly at dinner, but hardly spoke. During the day Emma occupied a set of attics under the roof, while Tom worked in his study directly below her.
And yet their courtship and early married life had started with such high hopes: once Emma was Tom’s chief champion and support, writing to his dictation, acting as his copyist, and encouraging him when his career seemed to be flagging. She was involved, too, in the writing of Tess of the d’Urbervilles, the book that would make his name.
Here was a puzzle. How did it all go so wrong? How did she feel when success overtook him, and he became a public figure, sunk in his work and his own creative vision at the expense of the marriage? Not too happy, I imagine.
The Bellini Madonna, Dark Water and now, The Chosen, are all set wholly, or partly, in the past. For many that could establish you very firmly as a writer of historical fiction. But is that how you see yourself?
This is a really good question. There are certain stories I’ve wanted to tell, and so far they’ve all seemed to be set in the past. I thought that was just accidental, but perhaps it isn’t. The past seems to have an established narrative which lends itself to challenge and reinterpretation. Perhaps the present is (for me) just more difficult to write about.
Something that I revelled in from your earlier books was the extravagance of your prose and your language. Sometimes it felt like an explosion of vowels and consonants landing all around me in the most perfect proportions. However, The Chosen is a slender volume by comparison. I was struck by how less ‘wordy’ it is and how what wasn’t said seemed to speak as much, if not more than what was said, if that makes sense! There were times in the book when I would read a sentence and instinctively pause before I took a breath and read the next sentence. And the silence in between those sentences was a chance for me, the reader, to play my part. To consider the implications. To understand the power of silence. To feel the unspoken emotion. Was that your intention?
Yes, it was. You’ve expressed the main idea behind the book so well. It’s all about what wasn’t said between two people when it should have been, and now can’t be said. And grief does make us tongue-tied; it has a strangled quality. Too late, after years of self-absorption, Tom realizes that he still loves his wife – that he’s always loved her, in fact.
Or is it too late? At one point Tom reflects, ‘So much went unspoken between Emma and me. I want to get away from whatever words we used, and nearer to what we really meant’.
Is the love poem that he starts to write to Emma’s ghost on the last page of the novel, ‘The Voice’ – the first of what will become his ‘Poems of 1912-13’ – enough? Can he finally say what he means? Can poetry be in any sense redemptive? In this case I think it can. Tom realizes that he hasn’t really lost Emma, that she lives in him, and that writing is the one authentic way he has left of speaking to her.
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| Hardy's Manuscript of 'Poems 1912-13' Photo: Elizabeth Lowry |
It’s evident from the book that your research has been extensive. The attention to detail is so impressive and it’s so meticulous that it evokes the essence of Hardy and his life in a palpable way. Could you tell us a little bit about that research? For example, how many times did you actually visit Max Gate?
Lots and lots. I went to Dorset every summer for three years while I was writing the book. Max Gate and Hardy’s Cottage (where Hardy was born) are both staffed by National Trust volunteers, who put up very patiently with me. The late Dr Faysal Mikdadi, the dynamic academic director of the Thomas Hardy Society, was also an ever-welcoming presence at Max Gate (before his tragic death in 2021 he did so much to promote a love of poetry, and of Hardy’s poetry in particular, as editor of the Inspired by Thomas Hardy series of anthologies of school pupils’ work).
Both the Hardy properties are well worth a visit: the cob-and-lime cottage, nestling in Thorncombe Wood, still evokes the simple rural world of his novels; the much more substantial, red-brick Max Gate, boasting all the late nineteenth-century mod cons (including a flushing WC!) the extent to which Hardy had travelled from that – or perhaps not. It’s only a three-mile walk from one house to the other.
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| Hardy's Cottage, Higher Bockhampton Photo: Elizabeth Lowry |
Relating to the previous question: the choice of a notable figure as protagonist in a full-length novel might be seen as a dangerous choice. Your research about him has to be faultless, or you run the risk of a Hardy aficionado seeking out any anomaly and taking you to task for it! Does this bother you?
All the time. It gives me sleepless nights.
I enjoyed the way that you gave Emma, although deceased, a voice through her diary entries and Thomas’s memories. It wasn’t, therefore, a one-sided conversation. You gave Emma such a potent voice and it struck a balance between Thomas’s side of things and hers. It’s a work of fiction, yet it germinated in fact. I was wondering how much of Emma’s voice was researched and how much was from your own creative imagination?
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| Emma's attic at Max Gate Photo: Elizabeth Lowry |
Reconstructing Emma’s secret diaries was the main challenge of the novel. Though Emma could occasionally be indiscreet, in her correspondence, about the trials of being married to an author, we’re unable to consult those diaries because Hardy took good care to burn them soon after he’d read them. When writing the diaries, I had to invent. I also had to be careful to take her seriously – to make her seem fey, perhaps, as we know from her reported conversation she could be in life, but not foolish. Emma was no fool, and she’d plainly got the measure of her husband early on: of his ambition, and his sheer creative will.
While on the surface this book seems very different from your previous two, thematically I felt they aren’t so far apart. I had quite a jolt when I read an entry in Emma’s diary which said, ‘Sometimes I think the whole of literature is a prison, erected on vanity & illusion. It has a thousand gaudy rooms & a million turrets & a grand front to lure the gullible, but it’s a prison all the same, a prison that takes constant shoring up & tending. If you’re married to one of the keepers then there will only ever be a Little Ease in it for you, & as to your real life – well, you can say goodbye to that’, because it reminded me of Hiram Carver in Dark Water, speaking of how we ‘cling to our false certainty and call it freedom and we can’t see what we’ve really created out of freedom is a prison.’ So, the equation becomes a paradox, because if we’ve created a prison out of freedom and literature is a prison, then is literature freedom? Does literature free you? Or, as a writer, do you feel imprisoned by it?
It was Emma’s support of Hardy’s ambition to be a writer that made her attractive to him at first, I think. That’s partly why he chose her. Emma’s appeal for Hardy lay in the absolute faith she had in his literary abilities, and her love of literature itself. She wasn’t only an avid reader but had ambitions of being a writer too. Once she was Mrs Hardy, these all came to nothing.
So yes, sadly it seems that marrying Hardy turned Emma’s youthful enthusiasm for literature into a lifelong prison. I imagine that Emma found the reality of the literary life hard to stomach: not just fitting around her writer husband’s relentless work schedule, but having to take second place to the constant pressure of an absorbing vision. The couple had no children. In the novel their childlessness, and the possible reason for it, becomes the agonizing focal point of her unhappiness. Emma must often have felt that in choosing her, Hardy had simply chosen to take literature to wife after all.
But I think you’re asking me if I personally feel imprisoned by writing. No, actually. I don’t think Hardy essentially did either (in the book, when he’s in full flow writing Tess, he remarks that it’s ‘like a miraculous reconstruction of himself’). He sometimes feels trapped by its demands, of course. But so do we all. It was his day job.
Also, in common with Dark Water, I felt The Chosen considers notions of memory and motivation. I felt you were asking readers to think about what people do, why they do it and how actions, so obvious to the perpetrator, can easily mystify others. At times in the book Hardy seemed so bewildered by his late wife’s perceptions as he reads her diary. Are these themes ones that you will continue to consider in your future work?
Yes. Again, you’re spot on! The question of unaccountable motives and deeds is key to whatever’s next, I think. And the question of passion or obsession, which are simply other names for inspiration.
Lockdown must have hit you right in the middle, or certainly a good way, through this book. How did it affect your writing and your writing routine? I imagine homeschooling at the very least must have impacted your time?
It was difficult. I wrote in the hours after school, which weren’t many, and became quite a nasty person. My daughter has forgiven me since, though (and we did skip PE lessons).
I usually ask authors about the first book that made them cry. But as I’ve interviewed you previously, I’ve already asked you that question! So I’ll ask you today what is the most recent book you’ve read that has moved you, if not to tears, then in some significant way?
I’ve been rereading all of Alice Munro’s short stories, as well as Elizabeth Strout’s novels. Both writers do so much while using an economy of means. Munro’s story ‘The Bear Came Over the Mountain’ (in her collection Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage) is a painful, vastly generous look at a long and difficult marriage (it has, incidentally, been made into a heartbreaking 2006 film starring Julie Christie, Away from Her. Anyone who likes The Chosen will absolutely love this too).
And Strout is always so good at suggesting the ways in which a life can go off track, and be corrected, and go wrong again: her Lucy Barton books (My Name is Lucy Barton; Anything Is Possible; Oh William!) are touchstones for me. No one else speaks as well as she does about the writing life, and the strains on others and yourself of working out who you are in words.
Something else I always ask a writer is what’s next? As a reader I often wonder whether writers take a break between books or whether they roll up their sleeves and start another one right away!
I tend to start another one as soon as possible – even if the actual writing of it takes ages – because I feel a bit lost without a book on the go. And anyway, what else am I going to do? What’s next: another historical novel, it seems. See above!
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| The author in Hardy’s cottage at Higher Bockhampton. Photo: Kitty Seidler |
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