FULLY BOOKED

An Afternoon with Elizabeth Lowry

25 August 2022, 3:00pm - 4:30pm

FULLY BOOKED

We are so pleased to be welcoming Elizabeth Lowry to the Museum on August 25th.

Spend the afternoon with Elizabeth for a book signing and reading of her highly praised novel ‘The Chosen’.

Tender, intimate and atmospheric, this haunting novel transports the reader into the austere house and shocked heart one of England’s greatest writers

One morning in November 1912 Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma dies. The two were married for over forty years, though increasingly estranged for the last twenty. Though they lived in the same house, Max Gate in Dorset, by the time of Emma’s death they were no longer speaking, and rarely even met. Emma spent her days and nights upstairs in the attic, while Tom wrote and slept on the floor below.

For the last four years, Tom has been in a tentative relationship with a much younger woman, Florence Dugdale. Like his family – who resented and avoided Emma – Florence assumes that he’ll be glad to be free. He isn’t. He is utterly shattered by the loss of his wife.

While Tom is still overwhelmed with grief he finds both a memoir and a cache of secret diaries by Emma, in which she railed about his failings as a husband, accusing him of having been her gaoler. Why did Thomas Hardy really choose Emma as his wife? What happened to them? What is life like for a woman whose own life and ambitions are buried beneath the artistic career of her husband, as he soars to literary greatness? And why did they never have children?

This is a novel about grief and regret, about Thomas Hardy at seventy-two, about the mystery at the heart of his long marriage to Emma Gifford, and the cost – to him, to those around him – of a writer’s life. Set in the eleven days following Emma’s death, it’s a love story and a ghost story – and the story of how some of the greatest love poems ever written in English, the ‘Poems of 1912-13’, came to exist.