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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor

of The Spectator, and this week my guest is the literary biographer and historian Paula Byrne,

whose new book is called Hardy Women, Mother's, Sisters, Wives, Muses. Well, it's either

Hardy Women or Hardy Women. It's the women in Thomas Hardy's life and the implied pun in the

title suggests that they may have had to be quite hardy to put up with him.

Paula, can you tell me how you came at this subject, first of all?

Well, yeah, I actually paid a pilgrimage, I guess, to Max Gate probably about four years ago.

So I'd seen the cottage before, but I hadn't actually been inside Max Gate.

And I happened to be in Dorset of visiting

friends. And I thought, I'm going to go and I went to visit the house. And it was visiting the

attic rooms where Thomas Hardy's first wife had retired to for 15 years. Really, really surprised me

when I went up into those rooms and I saw this, what she called

her, her boudoir. And just being in that attic room, I just thought, oh, my God, this is such a

story. And I don't feel I know enough about the women in Hardy's life. So that was the, that was

the starting point. And then I just thought, hmm, that would be, I'd love to,

because I've always loved Hardy, but I didn't know so much about the women in his life.

So that was the, yeah, that was the starting point. I mean, it starts, as you describe in

your introduction, with a sort of substantial hurdle to get over, which is, it's kind of

extraordinary, obsessive, privacy, Hardy exercise.

...