Maybe Later: Hardy, Bigamy, and the Grave

Despite the icy reception of “Jude the Obscene,” Thomas Hardy’s novel and later poems reveal deeply ambivalent feelings about marriage and marital permanence. Although Hardy was estranged from his first wife Emma for several decades before her death in 1912, his poetry and prose suggest that what Hardy wanted was a bigamous ideal rather than divorce. After Emma’s death, Hardy constructs just such an arrangement by evoking Emma’s ghostly presence in his “Poems of 1912–13,” much to the distress of his second wife, Florence. By analyzing the bigamous relationships of Jude the Obscure in light of Hardy’s romanticized view of a bigamous afterlife, this article highlights a conflicted Victorian perspective on marital permanence.