Using several poems by Thomas Hardy, Robert Alan Frizzell, a retired medical practitioner, suggests that the author’s wife, Emma, died not from “heart failure and compacted gallstones,” as is commonly believed (and which her own doctor listed as the cause of death), but from syphillis.

We know that Hardy had a weakness for pretty young women, and in the nineteenth century it was not necessary to be especially promiscuous to contract syphilis, just unlucky. As the old aphorism had it (still current when I was a medical student in the 1960s), “One night with Venus, and a lifetime with Mercury.” But however unlucky he was to contract the disease, he was well aware that Emma, whom he must have infected in his turn, had by far the worst of it—this is made explicit in “The Man With a Past” (from Moments of Vision, published in 1917):

There was merry-making
When the first dart fell
As a heralding,—
Till grinned the fully bared thing,
And froze like a spell—
Like a spell.

Innocent was she,
Innocent was I,
Too simple we!
Before us we did not see,
Nearing, aught wry—
Aught wry!

I can tell it not now,
It was long ago;
And such things cow;
But that is why and how
Two lives were so—
Were so.

Yes, the years matured,
And the blows were three
That time ensured
On her, which she dumbly endured;
And one on me—
One on me.

Hardy may have given his wife the disease, but his poem “Had You Wept” would seem to indicate that Emma, at least in his eyes, was the guilty party. Or was this simply the author’s way of documenting the marital woes brought on by his infidelity?

Had you wept; had you but neared me with
a frail uncertain ray,
Dewy as the face of the dawn, in your large
and luminous eye,
Then would have come back all the joys the
tidings had slain that day,
And a new beginning, a fresh fair heaven,
have smoothed the things awry.
But you were less feebly human, and no
passionate need for clinging
Possessed your soul to overthrow reserve
when I came near;
Ay, though you suffer as much as I from
storms the hours are bringing
Upon your heart and mine, I never see you
shed a tear.
[...]
When I bade me not absolve you on that
evening or the morrow,
Why did you not make war on me with
those who weep like rain?
You felt too much, so gained no balm for
all your torrid sorrow,
And hence our deep division, and our
dark undying pain.

There is only one way to read the line “When I bade me not absolve you on that evening or the morrow,” which is that Hardy denied having introduced the infection into the marriage, and said it could have originated in her. She met this with a dignified silence, when, he says, she should have raged—a veiled admission of guilt on his part. Events in the ensuing years of their marriage would seem to confirm this interpretation—Emma behaved from about 1891 like the injured party, withdrawing from the marriage and withholding all favor from her husband, writing critical résumés of her thoughts towards him, treating him with a haughty froideur.

Yet Hardy’s behavior towards his wife is probably most suggestive of his own guilt: “[he] was conciliatory and perhaps more patient than might have been expected had his wife been at fault.” Indeed, “Had You Wept” could be read as Hardy begging his wife’s forgiveness—he’s almost in awe of how well Emma is dealing with the onset of syphillis—but it seems most of his hurt stems from her emotional detatchment, which clearly extends to their marriage. But could anyone really blame her?