her lonely husband, with the Old Affection." Satires of Circumstance, Thomas Hardy's fourth book of verse, includes The Poems of 1912–13, a collection of poems written immediately following Emma's death. Hardy found a notebook titled "What I Think of My Husband" in her attic bedroom and spent the rest of his life regretting the unhappiness he had caused her. Some Recollections, and other writings Emma was an occasional writer throughout her life, working for example on her (unpublished) short story "The Maid on the Shore" during her engagement to Hardy. In later life, she wrote what Ford Madox Ford described as "her own innocuous poems", such as "The Trumpet Call (to the single Daffodil)" [1910] as well as prose poems which she published privately as Spaces in 1912. After Emma's death, Thomas Hardy discovered a book bound in brown paper, made from the pages of exercise books and stitched together with red thread. The title was Some Recollections by E. L. Hardy and the last page was headed 4 January 1911. The manuscript covered Emma's early life, up to the time of her marriage. Thomas Hardy included part of it in his autobiography The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, in pages 88–96. The whole of it was edited by Evelyn Hardy and Robert Gittings and published with "some relevant poems by Thomas Hardy" in 1961; a revised edition was published in 1979. Unsophisticated in style, and genial in spirit, Recollections makes plain Emma's early zest for life, and her uncomplicated enjoyment of what it had to offer. Musical evenings with her family; parties and balls, with "Splendid sashes and stockings and shoes...and very graceful and light and airy we all looked in them"; horse-riding on her mare Fanny, "scampering up and down the hills on my beloved mare...my hair floating on the wind"; and the Cornish scenery, "with its magnificent waves and spray, its white gulls and black choughs and grey puffins, its cliffs and rocks and gorgeous sunsettings": all are recalled in a lively way that explains Hardy's early fascination with her, and on which he drew decades later when he immortalised her in his Poems 1912–13. References External links Portrait of Emma Gifford aged 30 (at Dorset County Museum) Paintings of Dorset by Emma Lavinia Hardy (Art UK) 1840 births 1912 deaths 19th-century English women writers 20th-century English women writers Burials in Dorset English suffragists Thomas Hardy Writers