Visiting Thomas Hardy’s house at Max Gate

Max Gate is just outside Dorchester in Dorset and was the home of author and poet Thomas Hardy.  Originally trained as an architect, Hardy designed the house in 1885 commissioned his father and brother (both master masons) to build it.  The house was built on a one and a half acre plot which had been the site of the cottage and tollgate of a ‘turnpike keeper’ called Mack, hence the name ‘Max Gate’.  (It was later found that the house was right in the middle of a neolithic stone circle and an early Roman cemetery.)

Hardy lived at Max Gate for most of his working life and it was there that he wrote his most famous novels, including Jude the Obscure, The Mayor of Casterbridge  and my own favourite, Tess of the d'Urbervilles. Many famous writers were regular visitors to Max Gate, including Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, H G Wells, Robert Graves and George Bernard Shaw.

Thomas Hardy's Study

I was disappointed to realise that almost all the contents of Max Gate were sold before it was acquired by the National Trust  but largely thanks to the ‘encouragement’ of the Thomas Hardy Society,  they have tried their best to recreate the ‘feel’ of the place with similar furniture of the period.  All is not lost, however, as under a condition of his will the entire contents of Hardy’s study was relocated to the Dorset Museum, where it can be seen today.  The display includes Hardy’s collection of over four hundred books, many of which are his own first editions.  (Interestingly, Hardy moved his study at Max Gate to a different room with every book he wrote.)

It was particularly poignant to climb the narrow twisting stairway to the attic rooms of Hardy’s first wife Emma.  She asked Hardy to create her a private space where she could retreat from the world, and he was happy to do so.  Unfortunately, Emma became something of a recluse, spending most of her time in these small rooms until her death in 1912 at the age of 72.  After Emma died, Hardy searched her attic bedroom and found her writing, a small book she had written about her early life called ‘Some Recollections’  and a notebook entitled ‘What I Think Of My Husband’.  (After reading it he carefully burned the notebook in the garden, then spent the rest of his life full of remorse for the unhappiness he had caused her.)

Thomas Hardy lived in the house from 1885 until his death on 11th January, 1928. His youngest sister Kate bought Max Gate when it was auctioned in 1938 and bequeathed the house to the nation when she died in in 1940. Her wish was that income could be generated to pay for the purchase and upkeep of the old cottage at Higher Bockhampton where her brother had been born 100 years earlier.  (See Visiting Thomas Hardy's Birthplace.)

Review: The Queen of Last Hopes: The Story of Margaret of Anjou

Anyone who had tried writing historical fiction will tell you how challenging it is to find the right balance between carefully researched facts and the fiction necessary to ‘fill the gaps’.  The Queen of Last Hopes achieves this perfectly – and really makes you want to find out more about Margaret, who shines through as a strong woman with the same vulnerabilities we all have.

I’d been saving this book to read on my recent holiday, as my current work-in-progress is set during the reign of Shakespeare’s ‘She Wolf’, Margaret of Anjou, and I needed to learn more about the real woman behind the caricature we so often read about.  Susan Higginbotham’s book proved to be a great place to find that new perspective, as she is up there with the best historical fiction authors and has a refreshing attitude to rule breaking.  When did you last read a book where the narrator switches to a different character who proves to be writing from the grave, having described their own death?  Susan has chosen to apply her creative licence to the character of the Duke of Somerset, Henry Beaufort, as Margaret's lover - but the book is better for it – and I am sure he would have approved!

The Queen of Last Hopes: The Story of Margaret of Anjou
 on Amazon UK and Amazon US

Visiting Thomas Hardy's Birthplace

There is a road leading directly to the first home of writer Thomas Hardy in Bockhampton but I recommend taking the narrow footpath through the woods.  Set in a particularly peaceful and tranquil part of the Dorset countryside, the evocative smell of wood smoke drifts towards you before the old thatched cottage comes into sight. Even though my visit was on a hot summer afternoon, The National Trust, who own the cottage, had a log fire burning to help visitors travel back in time.

Built by Hardy’s great-grandfather and unaltered since his time, his early novels Under the Greenwood Tree and Far from the Madding Crowd were written there.  The thatch on the roof needs replacing and the original contents of the cottage have long since disappeared but I liked the way the National Trust have recreated how it may have looked, keeping a sense of a family home that was actually lived in.

Thomas Hardy was born in the cottage on 2^nd June 1840 six months after his parents were married.  His father, also called Thomas, was a stonemason and local builder. His mother Jemima was a servant and cook and reportedly had no wish to marry before she became pregnant. (She warned the young Hardy not to make the same mistake, a theme he explored several times in his writing.) Surprisingly literate, Jemima educated Thomas until he started school at the age of eight. His father taught him to play the fiddle and paid for him to attend a reputable school in Dorchester, a three-mile walk away.  Hardy did well at school and went on to qualify as an architect, although his ambition n was always to be a successful writer.

It has been said that Thomas Hardy was reticent about his humble upbringing and silent about his birthplace until well into his seventies. From what I know of him I think he would be proud, however, to see how his birthplace has become a worthy monument to his writing talent.

http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/hardys-birthplace/

Thomas Hardy's “A Pair of Blue Eyes”

Thomas Hardy's third novel “A Pair of Blue Eyes” is one of the few set outside his beloved Wessex, in Cornwall.   I was reminded of it by author and critic David Lodge, as I am currently reading his book The Art of Fiction, in which he quotes the opening line:  “Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface. Their nature more precisely, and as modified by the creeping hours of time, was known only to those who watched the circumstances of her history.”

Apparently Hardy revised the opening page many times before coming up with one of my favourite passages of character description:   “One point in her, however, you did notice: that was her eyes. In them was seen a sublimation of all of her; it was not necessary to look further: there she lived.  These eyes were blue; blue as autumn distance - blue as the blue we see between the retreating mouldings of hills and woody slopes on a sunny September morning. A misty and shady blue, that had no beginning or surface, and was looked INTO rather than AT.”

Elfride Swancourt, a beautiful and impulsive country girl, is the daughter if the local parson. She lives a life of seclusion until the arrival of two strangers shatters her peace and tranquillity.  In A Pair of Blue Eyes Hardy explores Victorian class-consciousness, courtship and love.  Hardy’s blue-eyed heroine, Elfride, is of course based on Emma Gifford, Hardy's first wife, who he married a year after the book was published in 1874.  Like his character, Stephen Smith, Hardy trained as an architect and travelled to Cornwall to 'take a plan and particulars' of the dilapidated church in the tiny hamlet of St. Juliot  near Boscastle, which is now forever associated with his novel.  

It was in St Juliot, in March 1870, that he met Emma Gifford, who was the Rector's sister in law.  Emma was described as having "a rosy, Rubenesque complexion, striking blue eyes and auburn hair with ringlets reaching down as far as her shoulders" and worked towards raising funds for the restoration of the old church by selling her watercolour sketches of it.  It has often been reported that there was an age difference between them, (possibly through confusion with Florence Dugdale, his second wife) but they were both aged thirty at the time.  

David Lodge reminded me that A Pair of Blue Eyes is credited with the origination of the term ‘cliffhanger’ and has the ultimate ‘cliffhanger’ scene. Read it for free on Kindle - and see if you agree.

A Pair of Blue Eyes is available as a free Kindle download from Amazon UK and Amazon US and the full text is also available as a pdf from The University of Adelaide Library  

The Developing Dylan Project

To mark Dylan Thomas’s centenary in 2014, Literature Wales has announced a new project, funded by the Welsh Government, called Developing Dylan. Through creative workshops, a prestigious international competition and a cutting-edge roadshow, Literature Wales will bring the wizardry of Dylan Thomas’s words to the children and young people of Wales and beyond.

The project was announced at Eisteddfod yr Urdd on Monday 27 May in the company of the Minister of Education and Skills Leighton Andrews, Chief Executive of Literature Wales Lleucu Siencyn, Children's Poet Laureate Eurig Salisbury, Dylan Thomas’ granddaughter Hannah Ellis and members of Pembrokeshire’s Young People’s Writing Squad.

Creative writing workshops based on the work of Dylan Thomas will be delivered by some of Wales’ top writers as part of the project. Applications for these workshops will be invited from schools across Wales. More information about this will be announced soon.

Developing Dylan is supported by a range of high profile writers and cultural figures such as Philip Pullman, Owen Sheers, National Poet of Wales Gillian Clarke, Joe Dunthorne, Bethan Gwanas, Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy, Young People’s Laureate Martin Daws, DJ Huw Stephens and Dylan Thomas’s granddaughter Hannah Ellis. The project will take place between October 2013 and October 2014.

His Dark Materials author, Philip Pullman wrote, “Poetic madness, intoxication, call it what you will, is something that I wish every young person could have a chance to experience. It is a real form of magic, of bewitchment. Being mastered by it was one of the great experiences of my life – it changed my life. It’s a rite of passage. Once you’ve gone through it, you’re never the same again.”

You can follow the project’s developments on Twitter: @Dylanwad100

Unexpected Gifts - When Ancestors Come Back To Help, by S. R. Mallery

Available on Amazon UK and Amazon US

Winner of the Reader’s Favorite Gold Medal!

A True American Family Saga

When Ancestors Come Back to Help

 

Can we learn from our ancestral past?  Do our relatives’ behaviors help mold our own?  In Unexpected Gifts, that is precisely what happens to Sonia, a confused college student, forever choosing the wrong man.  Searching for answers, she begins to read her families diaries and journals from America’s past: the Vietnam War, Woodstock and Timothy Leary era; Tupperware parties, McCarthyism and Black Power; the Great Depression, dance marathons, and Eleanor Roosevelt; the immigrant experience and the Suffragists.  Back and forth the book journeys, weaving yesteryear with modern life until finally, Sonia begins to make the right choices.

Unexpected Gifts is a work of literary fiction, laced with historical events for ages 16 and up.

What’s Being Said About Unexpected Gifts

“S.R. Mallery has caught the defining historic moments of one family…a rich and involving book, the author has written a gem.” ––Dorothy Salisbury Davis, A Gentle Murderer, Lullaby of Murder, The Pale Betrayer

“S. R. Mallery presents a fascinating journey through flashpoints of American history in an impressive, wonderfully thought out and well-told first novel.” ––Carla Davidson, former senior editor American Heritage Magazine

“In S. R. Mallery’s fine first novel each character’s distinctive voice helps make sense of the present by experiencing the past.  And who mattered.” ––Dan Vining, The Quick, The Next, Among the Living

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About the Author

S. R. Mallery has worn many hats in her life.  Starting out as a classical/pop singer/composer, she moved onto the professional world of production art and calligraphy, followed by a long career as an award winning quilt artist/teacher and an ESL/Reading instructor.  Her short stories have been published in descent 2008, Snowy Egret, Transcendent Visions, The Storyteller and Down In the Dirt.  Unexpected Gifts is her debut novel.

A former New Yorker, S. R. Mallery hails from a prominent writing family––her father, Jerome Ross, was a prolific television writer beginning in the Golden Age of Television, who also wrote for such shows as Mission Impossible, for which he won an Edgar Allen Poe Award, and The Defenders; her grandfather was a Pulitzer prize winner for biography and her great-uncle, a Pulitzer prize winning poet. Find out more at Sarah's blog: https://srmallery.blog/ and find her on Twitter Twitter @SarahMallery1

New Book Review - Beatha: A Badger's Story by Louise J Hastings

This story of the conflict between badgers and farmers in Somerset could hardly be more topical. As I was reading it, there was an announcement on the UK news about hundreds of campaigners from Gloucestershire travelling to London to take part in a rally against the plans to cull over 5000 badgers in Gloucestershire and west Somerset.  The UK government’s best plan seems to be to allow farmers  to do what they like, including night-time shooting of free-running badgers, to see if this proves to be a ‘humane’ way of solving the problem of bovine TB.

I’m no expert but I am prepared to bet that a lot of badgers will suffer, without any reduction in the spread of the disease.  An article in yesterday’s Guardian comments that ‘Many scientists argue the cull will make matters worse, increasing movement of infected animals, as fleeing badgers take disease to new areas and vacated areas are colonised by animals from elsewhere.’ There are also reports in the news of animal rights activists targeting farmers and attempting to disrupt the night-time shooting.

Louise Hastings tackles the problem of anthropomorphism in a relaxed and engaging way, so there is a sense of reading the badger’s minds rather than imagining them speaking in human voices. Farmers don’t come out of it very positively, of course, although their dilemma is explained. I watched an episode of Countryfile recently where a farmer was devastated as he watched his prize herd being diagnosed with TB. It is a very serious problem but I really hope that this new book will make people think about the issues.

Beatha: A Badger's Story is new on Amazon UK and Amazon US

Follow  Louise J Hastings on twitter  and visit her website