Picture caption - The illustration by Arthur J. Goodman shown at the top of this post originally appeared in The Pall Mall Magazine in April 1894 and depicts Robert Trewe and Ella Marchmill – Picture courtesy of Philip V. Allingham
An Imaginative Woman was first published as a serial in Pall Mall Magazine in 1894. It was originally part of Wessex Tales (1896) but Hardy moved it into his collection Life’s Little Ironies (1912) for reasons that he explains rather cryptically in his preface, but which throw some light on how he meant it to be understood:
Turning as it does upon a trick of nature … a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations.
Ella Marchmill, the ‘imaginative woman’ of the title is an aspiring poet, writing under the male pseudonym of John Ivy because ‘nobody might believe in her inspiration’ if they knew she was a woman. Her husband, a gunmaker, is her exact opposite in temperament and interests. When the couple and their three children go on holiday to Solentsea in Upper Wessex, Ella becomes obsessed with the previous occupier of their lodgings – a fellow poet by the name of Robert Trewe. During their stay in Solentsea she convinces herself she has fallen in love with a man she has never even met and desperately tries to arrange a meeting with Trewe. After a series of deliberate meetings and futile planning with the landlady, Ella realizes she is deeply in love with this unknown man. Soon it spells doom for her psyche and marriage.
' No, he was not a stranger! She knew his thoughts and feelings as well as she knew her own; they were, in fact, the self-same thoughts and feelings as hers, which her husband distinctly lacked; perhaps luckily for himself, considering that he had to provide for family expenses. '
“He’s nearer my real self, he’s more intimate with the real me than Will is, after all, even though I’ve never seen him,” she said. "I know his name very well; . . . and his writings"
Arthur J. Goodman. April 1894. Lithograph on Thomas Hardy's "An Imaginative Woman"
The Pall Mall Magazine (April 1894) [Ella Marcmill, right, and her landlady, Mrs. Hooper, relating to a scene on the facing page]. Courtesy - Victorianweb
Themes
Power of imagination and Unsatisfactory marriages
Painting by Tony Robert-Fleury of French psychiatrist Philippe Pinel (1745-1826) releasing lunatics from their chains at the Salpêtrière asylum in Paris in 1795.
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