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Summary
Summary
"[This] beautifully restrained novel, a meditation on aging, marriage and loss, fictionalizes a well-known period in Thomas Hardy's life" ( The New York Times ).
A November morning in the 1920s finds an elderly man walking the grounds of his Dorchester home, pondering his past and future with deep despondence. That man is the revered novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, and this is a fictionalized account of his final years from the celebrated author of The Elephant Keeper .
The novel focuses on true events surrounding the London theater dramatization of Hardy's acclaimed novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, including Hardy's hand-picked casting of the young, alluring Gertrude Bugler to play Tess. As plans for the play solidify, Hardy's interest in Gertie becomes a voyeuristic infatuation, causing him to write some of the best poems of his career. However, when Hardy's reclusive, neglected wife, Florence, catches wind of Hardy's desire for Gertie to take the London stage, a tangled web of jealousy and missed opportunity ensnares all three characters--with devastating results.
Told from the perspectives of Hardy, Gertie, and Florence, Winter is "a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness" ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review).
"A book for grown-ups, one that finds the acme of human happiness in a young mother looking out at a starry winter's night, while she holds her baby in her arms."-- The Washington Post
"Winter is quietly intelligent and compassionate, but what stands out most is that it is gorgeously, gorgeously written in prose so elegantly crafted that it becomes, paradoxically, almost invisible. It never shouts, never startles, just moves lithely along with an almost miraculous sense of rightness."-- Minneapolis Star-Tribune
Author Notes
Christopher Nicholson is a writer, living in England. His latest novel, Winter , was published by Fourth Estate in January 2014. His two earlier novels are The Fattest Man In America (2005) and The Elephant Keeper (2009). The Elephant Keeper was shortlisted for the Costa Novel Award and the Encore Award. A serial adaptation was broadcast as a BBC Radio 4 'Book of the Week'. He has two children, a son and a daughter. For the past twenty-five years he has lived in the countryside on the border between Wiltshire and Dorset.
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Thomas Hardy fans will be engrossed by Nicholson's fictional account of the true story of Hardy's infatuation, at age 84, with a married 18-year-old amateur actress, Gertie Bugler, playing Tess in the local Corn Exchange production of Tess of the D'Urbervilles. This disconcerting tale is told from three alternating standpoints: Hardy's, Gertie's, and that of Hardy's second wife, Florence. Although the women's narratives are credible and entertaining, Hardy's perspective dominates and captivates through its slow rhythms, antiquated vocabulary, and above all its third-person style featuring natural imagery, meandering syntax, and melancholy observations. In classic Hardy fashion, the novel begins with a rural landscape, zeroes in on the silhouette of an old man walking with his dog, and then reveals that the dog is named Wessex and the old man is the great novelist. Even before Florence has her say, the strains on their marriage are evident, what with Hardy preoccupied by work, memories, and increasingly by Gertie. Hardy invites Gertie to tea when Florence is away, watches Gertie's performance from backstage, keeps a lock of her hair, and imagines eloping. Gertie, meanwhile, imagines a London stage career, while Florence imagines widowhood. As in his two previous novels, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper) presents an impossible, inappropriate passion. This effort proves most remarkable for its deliciously archaic prose and portrait of the artist as an old man falling in love partly with a girl, partly with the disappearing countryside and lost youth she represents, and mostly with his own creation. (Jan.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Kirkus Review
Thomas Hardy's last love. In the winter of 1924, Hardy, 84, is living with his 45-year-old wife, Florence, and beloved dog, Wessex, in Dorchester. Their house has no electricity, and only with great difficulty has Florence managed to convince her husband to install a telephone. He feared, he said, that operators could listen in on their conversations. He refuses to have a car, although Florence offered to learn to drive. "He doesn't like anything new," Florence complains; "he would like the world to be as it was in eighteen fifty!" He is content to be isolated, in fact prefers it: Florence answers all his mail, declining interviews and invitations, while he retires to his chilly study and writes poetry. With tenderness and sympathy, Nicholson (The Elephant Keeper, 2009, etc.) imagines the writer's reclusive final years and the brief glimmer of passion that enlivened them. A local acting troupe, mounting a play based on Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles, has cast the lovely young Gertie Bugler in the title role. Hardy, who has long been following her career, is irresistibly attracted. Each man, he believes, has "an ideal though unattainable female spirit" that "moves freely from one woman to another"; that spirit, for him, resides in Gertie. When Florence sees poems apparently celebrating this new love, she falls apart. Like his deceased first wife, Hardy observes, Florence "read a poem as if it was a scientific tract" to be interpreted literally; he, though, recognizes that the woman he addresses is a "shape veiled by shadow or mist": like his fictional heroines, she is a figment of his imaginationbut, nonetheless, a powerful inspiration. Florence's jealousy and despair propel the plot, but this fine novel reveals more than marital tensions: Hardy's story becomes a meditation on love, regret, and an elusive yearning for happiness. Elegant, lyrical, and absorbing. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Nicholson channels the spirit of Thomas Hardy here, portraying the British novelist and poet as a despairing, bitter old man, living in a dark house in Dorset in the 1920s. This kind of portrait can be either a very good or a very bad thing, depending on how much the reader likes Hardy. In the story, Hardy's gloom is pierced by the prospect of having a gorgeous local actress, with whom he is infatuated, play Tess in a local production of Hardy's novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But Hardy fears this infatuation may be his undoing and so does his second wife, Florence, younger but every bit as bitter as Hardy himself. Hardy's growing passion for the local actress is the focus of the book a situation reminiscent of Dickens' affair with actress Ellen Ternan, except that Hardy's age and vacillation take away the suspense. The story is told from the points of view of Hardy, Florence, and the actress. Nicholson succeeds in sounding very much like Hardy, with brilliantly realized landscape and settings. The plot, however, lacks the intensity of Hardy's novels. Still, this will prove fascinating for the writer's devotees.--Fletcher, Connie Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
THE MALE GIANTS of English literature have often made bad real-life husbands, and the vindication of their suffering wives has taken various forms. Thomas Carlyle, and posterity, might never have realized what a difficult spouse he was without the diary of Jane Carlyle, which the historian read with dismay after her death. Mary Powell, "Wife to Mr. Milton," had her youthful ordeal imagined by Robert Graves in a witty first-person novel carrying that title. Now, in "Winter," the English novelist Christopher Nicholson sets out to avenge (up to a point) Florence Hardy, the decades-younger second wife of the aged Thomas, as she endures the fall and winter of 1924-25 inside a storm of sickness, jealousy and anger. At 84, Thomas Hardy has long since forsaken fiction for poetry, but his status as a Dorset sage still derives from such locally inspired novels as "The Mayor of Casterbridge" and "Tess of the d'Urbervilles." Shrouded in a temperamental gloom that has only been deepened by World War I, he maintains an "unvarying routine" that maximizes time at his writing desk. Although he dislikes giving interviews, he enjoys being flattered and remains jealous of Rudyard Kipling's Nobel Prize. His most frequent facial expression continues to be "one in which natural wariness and distrust concealed themselves behind a front of alert attention." Inside Max Gate, his Dorchester home, Hardy exercises the petty tyrannies of crankiness and eminence, not allowing the chimneys to be swept, no matter how badly they draw, or the trees to be cut back, even though they bathe the house in thick shadows. He animistically insists that the pines and beeches would feel pain from the ax. Florence Hardy has become obsessive about these unchecked trees, believing their spores to be responsible for a growth she's just had removed from her neck. She covers the scar from her operation with a fox stole, but is still beset with misery and nerves, mistaking the sound of hedgehogs mating in the garden for the cry of a baby. Her 10-year marriage has turned into an imprisonment. She is now, more or less, merely her husband's secretary, reading to him at night before they retire to separate rooms. Florence once taught school, but these days Hardy discourages her desire to write children's books. He charges her with composing the first draft of his autobiography, but promptly recasts her sentences in his own voice. Max Gate is kept "like a shrine" to Hardy's first wife, Emma, while he disguises the earlier marriage's "mutual hostility" in the guilty, longing poems he still writes to her ghost. On each anniversary of Emma's death, Florence must accompany Hardy to her predecessor's grave. And yet, for all her resentment at having to "live in the shell of his ownership," Florence also wants to proclaim her own possession of the great man, insisting despite all that they "do love each other." But by late 1924 it's becoming impossible to maintain this illusion. The emergency that provides "Winter" its slender plot - a story line that adheres closely to biographical fact - springs from an amateur theatrical production of "Tess," whose lead role will be taken by beautiful young Gertrude Bugler, wife of a local war hero and daughter of the very dairy maid who years before provided Hardy with the inspiration for his fictional heroine. Professional London reviewers forgive the production's provincial frailties (the set for the Stonehenge scenes visibly wobbles) and acclaim Mrs. Bugler's performance. There is soon talk that she, rather than Sybil Thorndike, will play the part in a London run. Florence protests the upgrade, insisting that Mrs. Bugler overacts and shouldn't in any case be thinking of leaving her small child for a stint at the Haymarket. Hardy, as besotted with Gertie as Dickens once was with the actress Ellen Ternan, plans to travel to the capital for her triumph, even though, as Florence reminds him, he wouldn't make the trip for her own recent surgery. Florence soon imagines herself cutting off Mrs. Bugler's tresses and felling one of her husband's precious, animate trees so that "blood erupts from the inside of its trunk." Mrs. Hardy's worst moment occurs with her discovery of a series of love poems her husband has written about Gertie. She casts them into the fire. The real-life Florence Hardy informed the actual Gertrude Bugler about the poems' existence and subsequent destruction, though one of Hardy's recent biographers, Claire Tomalin, isn't so sure, citing "Florence's long-established habit of inventing stories to produce the effect she wanted." Nicholson, in the sort of historical-fiction flourish no one can disprove, provides specific summaries of what the poems might have contained. Florence's forthright speeches to her imagined readers - "I am 45 years old and my life is in tatters" - are in keeping with the monologuist technique of Nicholson's two previous novels, "The Fattest Man in America" and "The Elephant Keeper." Each of those books' protagonists - an enormous Texan living in the 1980s and a British stable boy of the 18th century - is softer-spoken and less crazed with indignation than Florence. But her voice, like theirs, is compelling and consistent. In "Winter," Nicholson writes two first-person chapters for Gertie as well, chapters that supply additional information or just a new perspective on matters the reader has already witnessed. Thomas Hardy's own viewpoint is rendered - uniquely in Nicholson's fiction, I think - through the third person, in stretches occasionally made sonorous with the kind of eccentric diction Hardy himself tended to prefer: "As to the details of his habiliments. ..." The old man's portrait conveys something of the remoteness that infuriates Florence, while the vigor and directness of her own cris de coeur ensure that "Winter" is finally her book and not his. THE NOVEL HAS a few forced, even academic-sounding passages - including a brief treatise on connections between Hardy's thinking and James Frazer's "The Golden Bough" - but the book's fine, vivid moments are far more numerous: Gertrude handing Hardy her wedding ring just before she steps onstage in Dorchester; the Hardys riding home from the performance like "two old mutes"; Florence standing in the hall at Max Gate while "the furniture seems to watch me as if I were a stranger." Along with an observant and quite necessary portrait of Wessex, one of literary history's most famous dogs, the reader is given cameos of T.E. Lawrence, J.M. Barrie and the war poet Siegfried Sassoon. (In Sassoon's actual diaries from the early 1920s, one can find him arriving at Max Gate, being "greeted by the usual barkings and bouncings of Wessie and F.H.'s sad anxious little face at the door.") Gertrude Bugler died in 1992 at the age of 95, a last significant link to the long-gone childless Hardys. Michael Millgate, another Hardy biographer, insists "the beauty that had so distracted Hardy when he was in his 70s and 80s" never deserted Gertrude, "even in extreme old age." She left students of the great man with an enduring little mystery and has now provided the 59-year-old Nicholson, who began publishing novels only a decade ago, with the raw material for a strong addition to his small, odd and distinguished oeuvre. Inside his Dorchester home, Hardy exercises the petty tyrannies of crankiness and eminence. THOMAS MALLON'S most recent book is "Finale: A Novel of the Reagan Years." He teaches at George Washington University.
