A grandmother from the downs
Thomas Hardy is the novelist of Dorset, but one of his most powerful books begins on the downs above Wantage. His paternal grandmother, Mary Head, was born in Reading and brought up at Fawley, a small village high on the chalk south of Wantage. Family memory held that her childhood there had been poor and unhappy, and Hardy absorbed those stories as a boy. She married his grandfather, also Thomas Hardy, and lived out her life in Dorset.
Jude the Obscure
When Hardy came to write Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, he gave his hero the surname Fawley, and he set the opening chapters in a downland village he called Marygreen, generally taken to be Fawley, perhaps named in part after his grandmother. Jude, an orphan brought up by his great-aunt, dreams of the university city of Christminster (Oxford), visible as a glow on the horizon. The nearby market town of ‘Alfredston’ is Wantage, named for Alfred’s birth there. One of Hardy’s biographers links the book’s bleak opening to Mary Head’s memories.
Hardy went to see Fawley for himself while planning the novel, in the early 1890s. He was not charmed: he wrote of a ‘ploughed vale which might be called the Valley of Brown Melancholy’. By then the old village church had been pulled down and replaced by a new one designed by George Edmund Street (1865–66), and Hardy’s Marygreen, too, has a new church replacing the old.
Sisters at Denchworth
There is a second family link. Hardy’s sister Mary, a teacher, took a post at the village school in Denchworth, north-west of Wantage, where she was lonely until their younger sister Kate joined her. Whether Hardy visited them there is not known.
What to see locally
- Fawley: St Mary’s Church by G. E. Street, and a cottage said to be where Mary Head lived, now known as Jude Cottage (private).
- Wantage: Hardy’s ‘Alfredston’ market place, with Alfred’s statue.
- Denchworth: the village where his sisters taught.