EDITOR'S NOTES

The book is best read, perhaps, as a portrait of the house, the family, and their milieu: if you want a sense of the social world Hardy's success as a novelist had opened up to him - a world Emma regarded as better suited to her own attainments and connections than her husband's - this is the book for you. The blurb describes it as combining the interest of a novel and a memoir, as a figure based on the author, and already fascinated by the idea of a fictional character (Henchard) living in a 'real' building (now, of course, Barclay's Bank in Dorchester) is approached by the phantom of Hardy, and invited to discover what Hardy missed in love. Many members of the Society will know Jacqueline from her time as the National Trust's Scholar in Residence at Max Gate, and may well have heard presentations from her at the Conference, at the Dorset County Museum, and the London lecture at Birkbeck College in 2014.