Recommends: Hardy fest

First published in Prospect (Issue 197)  

The 20th International Thomas Hardy Conference & Festival
Dorchester, 18th-26th August

For at least the last decade of their marriage, Emma and Thomas Hardy had become so estranged that she had moved into the attic. Yet after her death in 1912, Hardy began an outpouring of desolate elegies, imagining himself haunted by her: “still she rides gaily / In his rapt thought / On the shagged and shaly / Atlantic spot…”

This is one strand of Hardy’s life and work picked out at the Thomas Hardy Festival, where the “Emma poems” (recently given new life in a slim volume selected by Claire Tomalin) will be read with piano accompaniment. Musical interpretations of Hardy abound, and there will be walking tours of the sites in his novels and performances of his work by poets Roger McGough and Daljit Nagra. Among the lectures given during the week, Professor Michael Irwin will speak on “The good little Thomas Hardy: a century of condescension.” No danger of that here.