Paula Byrne on Thomas Hardy's Women, Jane Austen's Humor, and Evelyn Waugh's Warmth

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1:39Conversations with Tyler is produced by the Mercatus Center at George Mason University. bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems. Learn more at Mercatus.org. For a full transcript of every conversation, enhanced with helpful links, visit conversationswithtyler.com. Hello, everyone, and welcome back to Conversations with Tyler. Today I'm talking with Paula Byrne. She has a new book out here, which I found in Daunt Bookstore in London. It is called Hardy Women, Mother's Sisters, Wives, Muses. It's about the women in the life of Thomas Hardy and in the novels of Thomas Hardy.

2:21Paula is a very well-known and best-selling biographer. She has, among other things, books on Jane Austen, which are wonderful, Evelyn Waugh, a best-selling book about JFK's sister based on new archival research, a best-selling biography of Barbara Pym. She has done work on 18th century slavery, images of Jane Austen. She has written two novels, and she leads a group called Relit devoted to the notion of bibliotherapy. Paula, welcome. Thank you for having me. Simple opening question. What did Virginia Woolf think when she went to visit Thomas Hardy? I loved what she said when she says his face looked like a round apple, because I always think of him with apples, partly because they made cider at home when he was a young boy.

3:11And I think it's just such a brilliant description of that sort of little apple, sort of slightly like an old withered apple, but still retaining some sort of juicy flesh. I think she did really like him. I think she liked him more than she expected to like him, which I think often happened with Hardy. People expected him to be really dour and pessimistic pessimistic because obviously of the books. And then when they met him, they were quite charmed. He had a very soft and gentle voice. And it was quite bewitching. It was quite mesmerizing. So, and I think she was very moved, obviously, because of her father and Leslie Stevens' relationship with Hardy.

3:53So she wasn't as acerbic as she was with quite a few people. I think she gave him quite an easy time on the whole. And this would have been in the teens, right, of the 20th century that she saw him? He was quite sort of caustic about the sorts of novels that she wrote that don't have a beginning, middle and an end. And she took it in good humour, but he was definitely sort of feeling that the world of the novel had changed beyond recognition, which it had, and that she was a pioneer of some of that. But he was still very sort of old-fashioned about a story must have that trajectory, beginning, middle, end.

4:35But I think they got on very well. If one visits Wessex today, are there still traces of Hardy's world or is it just simply homogenized and that's quite gone? Yeah, I mean, I think it is quite homogenized. The house, Max Gate, which is where I got the idea for writing the book, obviously retains that original sort of charm. It's very dark and it's an ugly house, but it's still, I think the spirit is there. And I vividly remember two things. One was his study at the top of the house where he wrote Tess and just feeling just the power of that room. And then the other room that really inspired the book was Emma's attic room, where she disappeared for sort of 15 years.

5:22So I think you get a little feel of that in the house and Max Gate and certainly in the cottage, because that is so beautiful. I've made many pilgrimages to Hardy's birthplace over the years. And that feels so unspoiled. But I mean, Dorchester, for example, is grim. It's shut down. It's just a horrible place. So you don't really get much of the sense of like the real rustic flavour. But the cottage is charming still. But say if one goes to Cornwall or Northumbria, you do feel traces of the past. Liverpool, for that matter. Why not Wessex? What went wrong there? It's a really good question. Liverpool, I don't know, maybe Liverpool, you know, it's a port.

6:03And I think that's really important. The thing about a port, I'm in Manhattan now and I'm by the river and it really feels like Liverpool. I feel like I'm back in Liverpool. I think there's something about a port because it's always changing. People are coming and going, there's musical influences. So you'd almost think that somewhere like Wessex, it would be easier to retain some of that. And yet it just has, I felt it looks very run down. I mean, I'm thinking really here at Dorchester, but obviously places like, you know, the seaside, Low Earth, the Cove, and all these beautiful places are still incredibly gorgeous.

6:38And I think that's where you do really get a feel. And to some extent, Dorchester, you know, where the prison was. And you look at Winchester where Tess was hanged. I mean, there are places in England where I think you can get a feel for that. But I think if you live in the life of the imagination like I do, I can really see it. But I took my son with me and he was like, this is a dump. This is horrible. There's no hardy here. So I think from the young eyes, he was just like, this world has gone. This world has evaporated. It can never come back. If we ponder, say, Jude the Obscure, what's your implicit model of why it is for Hardy first marriages are so hard to break from?

7:16I mean, that is a massive question. And Jude, I think so much of Hardy's life is poured into Jude. It was such a personal book for him. It would take a very, very long time to answer that question. But it was also around the time when he was writing Jude that his marriage had by then completely ended. There was no going back. And really interesting, it was the first book that Emma did not like, didn't want anything to do with, because there is this idea running through it is why can't you end an unsatisfactory marriage? Why can't you just live with somebody? Why can't you just divorce somebody?

7:54And this is a refrain, like, what do you do if you can't afford divorce or it's still frowned upon? Well, you could sell your wife like in the Mericaston Bridge, or you know you can do what you does which is you live with the object of your desire for the second time around but it's it's a question the second marriage question was so huge for Hardy because he was so miserable he was so miserable in his first marriage and he just couldn't see a way out but he did also come from that background that working class background where it's still really frowned upon to divorce or to leave your marriage.

8:30And it was so complicated with him because when she does die, he sort of fell back in love with her, which is so typical Hardy. But why write the 1913, 1914 poem star? He's in what? The first year of his marriage to Florence. She can't be crazy about that. Why is he self-destructive? Or is it what he needs to do to make a second marriage work? I don't know. I mean, there was a cruel streak in him, I think. I think you have to be quite cold-hearted to do what he did to Florence because having sort of moaned and complained about Emma and pretty much moved Florence in then to fall back in love with his wife is a little perverse and of course it made Florence feel completely awful and then she couldn't live with it was like Therese Rakan she couldn't live with the dead ghost but I do also think this is where my sympathy swings for Hardy that when somebody does die you tend not to think of the bad things they've done.

9:24You tend just to remember the good things they've done. I've noticed this over and over again. People tend to just really linger on the positives. And there was so much remorse. And he just did remember that beautiful young Emma. So he did want to pay tribute to that. But you've just got to remember Tyler as well. He's a writer. He's going to use that for copy. And he knew those poems were good. And it did unleash something so emotional in him. He wanted to be a poet. He didn't want to be a novelist. And I think that's really important to remember. He did not want to be a novelist. He felt almost pushed into it.

9:56He wanted to be a poet. And I think then when he starts writing this amazing poetry, he knows this is good. And that's how he wanted to be remembered. And I think in that sense, he didn't really care that it hurt Florence. You're also a couples counsellor. Do you still see this in couples today with first and second marriages? Yeah. It's a short answer. good answer why do so many hardy tragedies come in doubles can you say more about that well the story in say Jude the Obscure right there's two women there's two men there's a total of multiple marriages mayor of Casterbridge doubling is a theme it seems very Shakespearean right that there's a kind of ensemble of tragedy and different stories mirror each other or they show different facets of each other?

10:51I mean, I've never thought about it, but I think it's a really lovely point. And I think that it's a great plot technique as well. That sort of shadowing and that mirroring. I think, I mean, he's a great, I love his plots. You know, I think it's really, it's just so hard to get a plot right. And he does that really, really well. So I think again, but again, for me, for me writing the book, I was always conscious of this is a man that, those later novels, wants to get out of his marriage. So he's always looking at the alternative relationship, like what would happen if this happens or what happens if that wife dies.

11:26So he's always got that refrain going through in those later novels, but not in the first ones when he's still so madly in love. But also with Hardy, he's always in love with the unattainable. Like that's the whole thing with him. That's why I think the well-beloved is so interesting because it's the pursuit of the well-beloved that once you get it, you don't want it and I see that in couples cats a lot is that you know once you get it you know and and you know you you might have an affair and then you've got what you want and then suddenly all those small horrible things that you haven't seen because it's all been so romantic like oh god he doesn't brush his teeth before breakfast or those sorts of tiny things and the illusion is broken and then you're just back in the same place so I think for me for Hardy he almost as soon as he married Florence, he was falling in love with somebody else.

12:14And that's just what he seems to do all throughout his life, that unattainable beauty, because he's so susceptible to female beauty. In your readings, what do you take to be the primary Shakespearean element in Hardy? Just subjectively. I think there's a divinity that rough views or ends shape them as you will, that sort of sense of, I'm thinking again of Tess here as well, the idea that the gods are peevish and they've got a plan and they don't really care and that they're just going to move the pieces of chess on the board and I think of King Lear as well on that and the heath so I think that sense of yeah that sort of fatalism that sense that almost there's no free will like what could Tess do there's nothing she could do because the gods have got a plan and that sense of providence, that is really deeply Shakespearean, in Shakespeare's very dark period, I have to say.

13:10As you point out, Hardy never really stopped working until he had to. How good is the unknown Hardy? It seems to me everyone reads the same few novels. What do you recommend from the rest? I really like the minor works. And I'm going to, I am going to confess, like everybody else, I'd only read, before I undertook the biography, I read all the big ones. So obviously the first thing I did was set myself to read everything. And I did it in chronological order because I think that's really important. I always do that. I do that with Evelyn Moore, just read everything because I think you can really see the growth.

13:42And I do think some of those minor novels are really, really fascinating and sort of not Hardy-esque, you know, Two and a Tower. It's just so fascinating. It's so brilliant. The Telegraph and all the the sense of the new world and innovations. So I do, I really like the minor works. I find them interesting. But above all, I really love the poetry. And I really, really fell in love with the early poetry written when he was sort of 25. Because it's so modern, it was so shocking. When I read some of his early sonnets, I just thought this sounds like somebody is writing it today. It has the most fresh feel and voice.

14:21I would urge anybody who thinks they know Hardy to go back and read those early poems because they're really quite astonishing. But I do really like the minor works as well. Now, in another book, you argued that Mary Robinson was arguably the most interesting woman of her day in 18th century England. Why? I think because she really understood celebrity, even before celebrity had been invented. She really understood how to market herself how to fashion herself how to reinvent herself and how to support herself and she was really I think a very very interesting writer as she understood the importance of image really before before many many many people did and used it to her advantage so I think she is for many many reasons so fascinating and you know the poetry of the Morning Post.

15:21I mean, she was a prolific writer and poet. She didn't let her disability impede her. I was really frightened of her when I was writing about it. I was like, I don't ever want to meet this woman. She's really scary. And I couldn't wait to get her out of my house when I finished writing about it. But I still, I think about it all the time. In fact, I'm writing a novel about it at the minute. That's great. Who is arguably the most interesting woman in England today? Hmm. That is such a good question. I don't really find anybody interesting in England, really. Catherine Rundell?

15:57Amiya Sreenivasan? I would think Catherine Rundell, whether or not one agrees, she would be the obvious first pick. My mind just goes, I instantly go to people like Sally Rooney, but I don't really like her. That's not England. And that's Ireland, yeah, not Great Britain. Well, you are from Liverpool, right? I am from Liverpool, yeah. Yeah. On the other side of the water, a messy side. So, yeah. But they have a lot in common, culturally. Yeah. No, they do. They do. But I, yeah, I've been living in America for far too long. I've been in America for six years. So I'm like, I'm really not sort of aware of interesting women, much to my shame.

16:38Now, you've had a longstanding interest in Jane Austen. What's your sense, if you think of late Georgian theatre in England, which was a big influence on Austen? but just how good was it if you or i went to one of those plays would we be bored would we think it's stupid would we be amazed and wonder why the theater had declined what do you think obviously it's guesswork but you must have a sense i think they did it quite interestingly because you know they would do like a five-act serious play and then there would be like a farce and then there would be or at a dance and so there was a little bit of something for everybody so you could go and see your shakespeare and i think particularly in the georgian era this is the time when those really great actors you know sarah siddons and you know obviously garrett coming to the end of garrett but kean edmund kean george cook you know these dora jordan these absolutely brilliant actors and it's so hard because we don't know how why they were so great like we've i mean jane austen talks about edmund kean in her letters and says it's he's so natural but we don't know what that means like to us it's like we think of method acting don't we we instant we might go to sean Penn or we might go to the great method actors.

17:49And so when they say, oh, he's so natural, what does that actually mean? It can't mean the same thing that it can mean to us. But what I do know is it wasn't like declamation and, you know, throwing your hands and being like over the top. It was tempered down. I think when Joan Austin calls it real hardened acting, good acting is real hardened acting. So I think there was definitely, you could see some of that. But a A lot of people just sometimes went for the farce. And the farces, I think, were great. Like, She Stoops to Conquer is hilarious. They're the rivals, Sheridan. People would just go and spend, they'd go halfway in and see the last bit of the main play.

18:25And then they'd see some great farce. And I think often people went to see each other. They went to look at each other. So there was a lot of gazing around the room and who's there, what are they wearing, what are they doing. And also it's very noisy. So people didn't sit there in deference like they do now. There'd be chatting and jostling and talking, and it was much more sociable. And it's a place where the classes intermingle, and there aren't many places like that in Georgian society because it's so stratified. So I think it's really fascinating as a sort of social space where you might mistake a prostitute with a fine lady because she's wearing the clothes of a fine lady because she's bought them secondhand.

19:01You've got all these interesting things going on, but I think it would be really good fun. And how is the farce related to Austen? Well, she loved farce. In her letters, she talks about going to see Don Dewan and it's a farce and she's like, a compound of cruelty and lust, she calls it. And there's other farces that she, The Wonder, A Woman Keeps a Secret, it's not very feminist, by Susan Suntleva. And she's laughing and she says, oh, the farce really pleased me. And I think she had quite low taste. I think she was hard to please. So she really liked the farce. And also she used to take the children of the family so they'd like a good farce.

19:36so I think she was quite eclectic in her taste but you know these clowns were really funny they were really good and I think I say she wasn't a snob she wasn't an intellectual snob she didn't just she did want to see Mrs Siddons in the great Shakespearean roles but she also loved comedy and she is a comic writer which we all forget about which is the most important thing to remember about Jane Austen is how funny she is so and I would I argued in my very first book that she never have been such a good comic writer if she hadn't watched all those falses, if they hadn't performed them at home, if she hadn't read them.

20:08Because her sense of comic timing is derived from 18th century theatre. Pride and Prejudice is so much dialogue. So it is like being at a play. And then she used to read her novels aloud. And that is like being at a play as well. So for me, that was such a big and undervalued influence. How is Mansfield Park set against a background of war. Total war, you could say, by the standards of the time. Well, she's a war novelist because many of her novels are written in the background of the French wars and the Napoleonic Wars. Mansfield Park, I think, is particularly, 1814 is a really interesting year.

20:49There's some very interesting books being written in that year. It happens to be my favourite Jane Austen novel, Mansfield Park. I know everybody hates it, but I really love it. I find it so different to the others and so much more serious and so much more interesting. So although she doesn't set out to deal with, she's not a war novelist, but it infiltrates, you know, it's so turbulent, you know, that something is always happening in the shadow hinterlands. You know, you will get that feeling with Mansoor Park of great unease, I think, that the house itself's corrupt. I've always felt that the Crawfords coming in and corrupting the house isn't what's really going on.

21:27It's the house that's corrupt. And the house is built on the spoils of the slave trade. So I think it's much more interestingly, politically. The trips to Antigua, there to slave plantations? Yeah. Very clearly. And she says so. And Sir Thomas, the house is built. It's a new house, Mansford. It's built on the spoils of the slave trade. And he goes out because there's unrest. And we don't know what that is, but there were enslaved riots happening at that time. especially in Antigua and he takes his wild son with him in the hope to get him away from wild company which doesn't work but I think you always get that sense of the spoils of the slave trade and then of course Fanny's the only one brave enough to ask Sir Thomas when he comes back and she asks the question about the slave trade and nobody else is really interested so they don't want to talk more about it but she does so it's a very important moment in the novel that this shy, timid, diffident little girl is the one who says, tell me more about what's happening with the slave trade.

22:28And again, the Lord Mansfield connection. Anybody reading Mansfield Park is going to think of Lord Mansfield and his role in the abolition of the slave trade. So that's about the nearest, I think, she does come to politics. She stays away from it, a bit like me, but it's there. It all seems political to me, just the relationships between the sexes and class and who does what to get ahead. I'm not sure she sees a relevant alternative, but it's mostly an indictment as I read those novels. Yeah, I would agree. She was an abolitionist, right? Absolutely. She was obsessed with this really interesting man called Thomas Clarkson, who wrote the first history of the slave trade, also from Liverpool.

23:10Or he went around Liverpool, I know he might have been from Liverpool, I can't remember. But she was obsessed with Thomas Clarkson, who was the first person to argue that instead of slave and human traffic, if you want to trade with Africa, you could do this with goods, with beads, with clothes, with all sorts of different things. And she really, really, so she absolutely, I think, abhorred the slave trade and everything gets stood for. And when does the opium trade pop up in her novels? Does it? Persuasion? Maybe I'm misremembering. Anyway, we will ask Chad GPT in our spare time when we're done.

23:44Definitely. You recommend a movie, Patricia Rosima's version of Mansfield Park, which is now in my to watch list. But why is that more interesting and vital than most other Austen adaptations? I think at the time, it was quite a while ago, I saw it and it did feel very refreshing because it was, it really engaged with the politics, it engaged with the slave trade. I think it revealed Franny as more spirited. It's not a faithful adaptation, put it that way. And I know it really did divide people, but I thought at the time I was like, it's really fun. It's really risque and it's fresh. But then I saw it again recently and I was a little disappointed.

24:23I was like, oh, it's not as brilliant. You know how you go back to a film that you love and you think, oh, that's so great. And you go back and you're like, I don't think anybody's really got Mansfield Park right. But there was something very new and fresh and vivid about the way that she filmed it as well. And filmically, it's really interesting. And I really liked her depiction of Tom Bertram, the wayward son and his engagement with the slave trade. And I really liked the way Harold, because Harold Pinter played Sir Thomas and he was really a he was he was a bully which I've always felt that Sir Thomas is a bully so she took she took lots of lots of risks I mean ultimately she doesn't get Fanny right but I just felt at the time yeah keep it fresh keep it relevant we don't have to be so faithful and we don't have to be like all frocks and smocks and big houses like every Jane Austen adaptation the house is way bigger than what what it would have been she's not interested in aristocrats.

25:13She's interested in gentility. So they've always kind of got it wrong. And the films I like, I love Clueless. Clueless is the best adaptation. Because it's so funny. She just gets the funniness. And that's the really important thing. Clueless is so great. And that has never lost its charm for me. Your book on Yves Lenoir, the phrase pops up, and I quote, naturally fastidious. Why can it be said that so many British people are naturally fastidious? Your questions are so crazy. I love it. Did I say that? I think Evelyn Waugh said it, not you, but it's in the book. Do you know, give me the context of that.

25:57I'd have to go back and look. It's just in my memory. But it's a claim. It's a great phrase. We can evaluate the claim on its own terms, right? I'm not sure they are anymore. It seems maybe they once were. But the stiff upper lip tradition seems much weaker with time. Yeah, I think Evelyn Waugh would be appalled with the way England has gone. Naturally fastidious. Yeah, I think, yes, it's different to reticent, isn't it? It's fastidious. Hard to please, it means, doesn't it? Naturally hard to please. I kind of think that's quite true of Evelyn Waugh's general, certainly of Evelyn Waugh, because he was naturally fastidious.

26:37That literally sums him up in a phrase. If I go to Britain as an American, I very much have the feeling that people derive status from having negative opinions more than positive. And that's quite different from this country. Would you agree with that? I would. And I would agree. And I think one of the things I've always loved about America was that I know it's such a cliche about, you know, Americans have this sense of positivity and you can do anything, but it's true. and you know and I do find in England there is a sort of real e-all sort of dour sort of putting putting you down or putting you in your place but I kind of like that as well so like with scouse humor it's very much keep you in your place don't get too big for your boots and I kind of like it because I think the corollary the you know the opposite of that is what the phoniness of Americans like you know when you go to LA and everyone's like oh my god you're so beautiful that's amazing and like, oh my God, like, you know, and you just think you don't mean a word of what's coming out your lips.

27:41So I think like the balance, New York feels like the balance is pretty right. When did that start in Britain? Does it exist at the peak of Victorian Britain? One doesn't feel it in John Stuart Mill or many other writers. What's the evolution of that? Because you've written British biographies about a number of different eras. You mean the stiff upper lip? Well, the negativity as a means of conferring status upon yourself? Yeah, I mean, I think it's slightly tall poppy syndrome that you don't want to big someone up too much because it makes you feel small and it takes your light away from you if you're a tall poppy.

28:18But I think it is tied in with something that I've really come to value the older I've got, which is English reticence and English diffidence. And I actually, the older I get, the more I'm like, I really like that because it does feel very intrinsic to who I am as a British person, which is, it may not be, you might say negative, I might say realistic, you might say pessimistic, I might say honest. You know, it just sort of depends how we define these things. But I think when someone gives you a compliment, or to me, they mean it in England. They mean it because they very rarely give you one. And I'm like, oh, you must really mean that.