Thomas Hardy and Florence Ellen Hungerford Henniker (nee Milnes) 1855-1923

Florence about 1893

As for one rare fair woman, I am now but a thought of hers, I enter her mind and another thought succeeds me she prefers; Yet my love for her in its fulness she herself even did not know; Well, time cures hearts of tenderness, and now I can let her go. Wessex Heights 1896 Chronology Arthur Henry Henniker She has always been a sincere and affectionate friend to him, staunch and unaltering - and, I am glad to say, she is my friend too. There was never any idea of his letting her go - for he, is true and faithful to his friends, but the poet wrote that. Florence Hardy to Lady Hoare 1914

Florence Henniker admired Hardy's genius as a writer, while Hardy respected her as a person, and loved her more than she knew. For many years her friendship and loyalty were a great solace and comfort to him. His early idealisation of her was transferred to the heroine of Jude the Obscure, and her religious conventionality affected its ending. Idealisation settled into steady affection, constituting one of the two great and lasting friendships of his life - perhaps the most important of all. Between 1893 and 1922 Hardy and Florence wrote many letters to each other.

They were not written with posterity in mind. Mrs Henniker sent them to Florence Hardy, thinking that they may be useful in preparing a biography of Hardy. Mrs Hardy thought they formed ' a most interesting whole', quite the best letters that her husband had ever written: she considered publishing them in a limited edition.

The collaboration between Thomas Hardy and Florence Henniker on their 'end-of-the-century Narrative', 'The Spectre of the Real' (1893), invites an investigation of the figure of the authorial double. The fin-de-siècle qualities of the tale reside not only in its somewhat sensational content - misalliance, bigamy, blackmail, accidental death and suicide - but also in the instabilities of a text which was generated by a potent combination of the erotic and the commercial. The joint composition of this tale enabled a male-female collaboration which does not eliminate, but reinforces, sexual difference in a plot which illustrates the dangers of any disruption of masculinist hegemony. Mrs. Henniker's subordination to her famous partner illuminates the plight of the late-Victorian woman writer who, unfamiliar with the practices of the commercial world, characteristically sought the collaboration or literary aid of the men who dominated the literary marketplace.

"The carefully inconspicuous place given the Hon. Mrs. Arthur Henniker in 'The Later Years of Thomas Hardy' seems to warrant some account of her life and more particularly her friendship with Hardy. It was a friendship that meant much to him at a dark and embittered time and lends meaning to his last novel ['Jude the Obscure'] and a number of his poems. Her own novels are quite forgotten today, but in Hardy's biography she deserves to be remembered. Mrs. Henniker was the Hon. Florence Ellen Hungerford Milnes. She was born in 1855, second of the three children of Richard Monckton Milnes, first Lord Houghton, the friend of Tennyson and the editor of Keats. In 1882 she was married to the Hon. Arthur Henry Henniker-Major, youngest son of the fourth Lord Henniker. It does not appear that Hardy really knew Mrs. Henniker until 1893. He had met her father in London in the early 80's . Indeed, Lord Houghton had sought him out. He had once remarked to his biographer, 'I think I know every man of letters now whom I want to know, except one', and the exception was Hardy, for whom he felt a great admiration'. That admiration his daughter shared and, having some slight acquaintance with Mrs. Hardy (and possibly Hardy himself), she asked the two to Dublin for Whitsuntide in 1893, an invitation that the death of Hardy's father had postponed from the year before. Their friendship ripened quickly. The two began a vigorous correspondence, and there were frequent meeting in London or the country. One memorable word sufficed for Hardy's first impression of Mrs. Henniker. A charming 'intuitive' woman apparently', he wrote in his diary. Mrs. Hardy advised that Sue Bridehead [in 'Jude the Obscure'] was in part drawn from Mrs. Henniker. Hardy wrote to Gosse of Sue that she was 'a type of woman which has always had an attraction for me, but the difficulty of drawing the type has kept me from attempting it till now ... Hardy's warm friendship for Mrs. Henniker continued to the end of her life ... When she died, 4 April 1923, he wrote in his diary, 'After a friendship of 30 years1' It was almost thirty years, almost to the month, since they had met in the Viceregal Lodge at Dublin, 'When that first look and touch, Love, doomed us two!'"

Florence Henniker
In the Life, Hardy notes 'December [1893]. Found and touched up a short story called "An Imaginative Woman"'; this revision is no doubt the printers' MS. which he made for PMG from the surviving MS. The story would appear to have been initially written in August and September 1893, while the key event in Hardy's conception of Ella Marchmill and many incidental details of the story was his first meeting with Florence Henniker three months earlier, on 19 May in Dublin. A study of the MS. and subsequent versions of the text reinforces the importance of her influence on the story.

It has often been recognised that certain features of 'An Imaginative Woman' recall Mrs Henniker: for instance, as Evelyn Hardy and F.B. Pinion note, 'the Solentsea where the heroine stays is Southsea; like Mrs Henniker, she is interested in Shelley's poetry [and] her husband, like Mrs Henniker's, was most unpoetical and connected with the weapons of war'. The MS. shows that four times on the first leaf Hardy originally wrote 'Marchfold' as Ella's surname before altering it to Marchmill, perhaps to strengthen the similarity between the names of Ella Marchmill and Florence Ellen Hungerford Henniker, née Milnes. Her beloved poet is throughout the MS. called Robert Crewe, not Trewe as he later became in all published versions. Crewe has associations with Florence Henniker because her uncle was Lord Crewe whose home was Crewe Hall in Cheshire. Other incidental details of the story which might have been prompted by the friendship with her are the photograph of Trewe which Ella takes to bed (in his second letter to her Hardy apologises for forgetting to give her a photograph:) and the lock of Trewe's hair which Ella requests after his death (Mrs Henniker's father possessed a lock of Keats's hair). Perhaps even Hardy's awareness that he and Mrs Henniker narrowly missed meeting each other thirteen years earlier may lie behind the series of frustrated meetings which punctuate the story.

Florence Henniker and her husband had lived on South Parade, Southsea, for the previous year, and Robert Trewe had lived on New Parade, Solentsea, for less than two years. Both houses faced the sea, and it would seem that the house in which Ella Marchmill stayed is modelled on Mrs Henniker's. Most curiously, Hardy sought to remove any emphasis from the location of the story in Solentsea/Southsea. The opening sentence of the MS. originally set the story at the 'watering-place of their choice' and this was revised to the '|well-known marine| watering-place of their choice |of Solentsea in Upper Wessex|'. Hardy then deleted 'of Solentsea', and this modified sentence is what PMG and 1896 read. Only in 1912 did Hardy immediately identify the story as being set in Solentsea. In other versions of the story, the first reference to the name of the town occurs more than two-thirds of the way through, after the Marchmills have left it.

1912 is the occasion when Hardy moved 'An Imaginative Woman' to Life's Little Ironies: that is, as he moves the story from Wessex Tales, he curiously locates it more prominently in Wessex. As with the change of Crewe's name to Trewe, it is possible that Hardy felt the story would be too obviously associated with Mrs Henniker and therefore sought to give less prominence to its setting in her town; only twenty years later did he feel able to restore his original wording of the MS.

Hardy seems to have felt in 1893 that the story would be too obviously identified with Mrs Henniker unless he tried to disguise some of the parallels. He may have been prompted to do so by a desire to conceal his romantic feelings about her from Emma Hardy, or by a wish not to embarrass Mrs Henniker publicly. However, another occasion when Hardy considered using Solentsea in a story might suggest a further possible motive.

'An Imaginative Woman' would appear to have been written about August or September of 1893. In the early autumn of that year, Hardy was also collecting and revising the stories which would appear in Life's Little Ironies, to be published in 1894 by Osgood, McIlvaine. One of these was 'On the Western Circuit', a story originally published in the English Illustrated Magazine and Harper's Weekly in 1891. Hardy took the opportunity to revise it when preparing for its publication in Life's Little Ironies, and these revisions resulted in the galley proofs of the volume. The galley proofs have survived and are now held in the Dorset County Museum. They show a host of revisions to the magazine versions of the story, but the one which concerns us here is the honeymoon destination of Raye and Anna. In the English Illustrated Magazine and Harper's Weekly, they were to have honeymooned in Tunbridge Wells, but the galley proof has them going instead to Solentsea. Hardy emended this in the margin to 'Knollsea' (Swanage) which is what eventually appeared in Life's Little Ironies. Solentsea therefore only ever appeared in the galley proof of the story and was never in any published version. The proof page containing the first of these Solentsea/Knollsea variants bears the printers' date stamp for 12 December 1893, which is also the month when Hardy was preparing the printers' MS. of 'An Imaginative Woman' for its magazine appearance. That is, in the same month Hardy deleted references to Solentsea from two of his stories which he had inserted only two or three months earlier.

The reasons for the timing of these changes can be explained by reference to the developments in Hardy's relationship with Mrs Henniker. After a very intense beginning to the relationship on his part, Hardy soon appears to have tried to act and write more circumspectly after seeing that his feelings for her were not reciprocated, so that, in a letter of 10 September 1893, he ends by saying that 'You may be thankful to hear that the one-sidedness I used to remind you of is disappearing from the situation. But you will always be among the most valued of my friends, as I hope always to remain one at least of the rank & file of yours' (Letters, II, 31). The alterations which Hardy made to the two stories in the early autumn revealed the romantic associations which Solentsea had acquired for him, and for that reason they needed to be undone when December arrived, by which time their relationship was on a determinedly platonic level. Solentsea as a honeymoon destination was certainly not a place to be mentioned any longer, and it could not be prominently announced as the holiday home of a married woman besotted with a poet, which would have displayed all too clearly the elements of fantasy and role-reversal which contributed to the writing of 'An Imaginative Woman'.

Major-General the Hon. Arthur Henry Henniker-Major CB 1911