Dear Thomas Hardy,
Rachel Billington, War Babies
I have been a fan of your torrid tales since I was a teenager. Nevertheless I have always wanted to ask you a question that you may find unacceptably critical.
I shall state my credentials. I am a novelist myself and since 1968 I have owned a fourteenth century house in Dorset. I bought it because of you. I visited your own first Dorset home, quite small with a thatched roof, and your second, much grander, built with the profits of literary success. You made this part of England famous, christened it Wessex, my local town, Sherborne became Sherton Abbas and Dorchester became Casterbridge which gave its name to one of your best known novels,‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’.
But the best known of all is Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It is one hundred and thirty years since you created her, but she still lives in the imagination even, with those who may never have read the book but seen the film. Indeed who could forget that dreadful moment when Tess who has committed murder in the interests of good behaviour, is arrested at dawn as she lies sleeping on one of the fallen stones of Stonehenge. When she wakes and sees the dark figures approaching, she murmurs, ‘It is as it should be.’
Which brings me to my question, ‘Dear Mr. Hardy, you are a great writer, but why do your heroines have to be so tragic?’ Far from being wicked or cruel, they are mostly innocent of any fault. Indeed Tess of the d’Urbervilles is subtitled, ‘A pure Woman faithfully presented.’
It is true that your male characters can have a hard time, Take Angel Clare, poor Tess’s lover, or the miserable hero of ‘Jude the Obscure’. But far more often women are at the centre of the stage, the axis of the plot, the reason for the novel’s existence. Yet every one is doomed to disaster, as if their beauty and desirability, makes the gods jealous and determined to deliver them into torture and suffering and maybe, as Tess, to the gallows.
Much has been written about the place of fate in your books, revered Mr Hardy. But you are the author of these womens’ fate! You are playing God. Could you not take pity and bring them to the joys of happiness and love? Because your books are all about love. The love that destroys.
You may point to another writer, Leo Tolstoy, who sent his heroine, Anna Karenina (also the star of many movies) to her death under the wheels of a train. It is as if, because women at the time you were both writing, had so little power in the world, the only way they could justify their top billing in a novel was to become a tragic heroine. Can this be fair?
You will answer, perhaps, (if you could) that the role of the novelists is not to be fair, but to grip their readers in an emotional vice. In this, I must admit, you excel.
I will sign off, with little hope that I have convinced you, but determined to have the last word by saying that a woman can be strong, beautiful, sexy, successful and happy. She can also be good material for a novel.
Yours as ever,
Rachel Billington
