The Chosen

Elizabeth Lowry (Riverrun, £16.99)

ABIOGRAPHICAL novel that wears its research lightly is a very fine thing. When an author plunges deep into extensive research and then leaves it to one side to spin the results into an imaginative and revelatory account, the reader can go along for the ride feeling secure and with keen anticipatory pleasure. It’s what Hilary Mantel achieved with her‘ Wolf Hall’ trilogy, and elizabeth lo wry has done something similar with The Chosen, giving a startling insight into the lives of an ageing Thomas Hardy and his wife, Emma. She has tightened her dramatic focus onto a short time frame around the day of Emma’s death and a brief period beyond that, reaching into the past by means of Hardy’s recollections of earlier days, his memories unlocked and revealed to be painfully unreliable in the light of his discovery of his wife’s notebooks and diaries. The author sheds light on Hardy’s character—suppressed and dogged, single-minded and obstinate, paralysed by self-doubt, lacking in confidence and humour —through his own interior monologue and the sharply critical observations made by Emma.

In Emma’s opinion, he ‘understands only the women he invents’: Tess Durbeyfield, Bathsheba Everdene, Eustacia Vye spring off the page as full-blooded, vulnerable, passionate women, but he seems unable to see any such qualities in his own wife, who considers him to have a rare gift, but despairs at his ‘sheer ordinariness’. ‘What’s the use,’ she says, ‘of being a great writer if it doesn’t also make you a great man?’

Hardy and Emma made each other extremely unhappy. Their marriage produced no children, but, after her death, Hardy mourned her bitterly and produced an outpouring of poetry. This novel is exquisitely written and powerfully perceptive, yet never loses sight of its biographical nature.