Unexpected Elegies

After the death of his wife, Emma, in 1912, the great English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy began to write a series of poems about her. Although the couple had long been estranged, Hardy was suddenly enthralled all over again and became obsessed with memories of their love, as well as with remorse over what had gone wrong between them. This sequence, "Poems of 1912-13," has grown in stature in the century since it was written and is now considered to be one of his mos accomplished works. Hardy continued to write about Emma for the rest of his life, and Unexpected Elegies includes a selection of the best of these other poems about Emma. The insightful introduction by the noted Hardy critic Claire Tomalin places the poems in a biographical context.