That Hardy’s life was spent almost exclusively in the company of other men, that he scarcely ever saw a woman, was, in those days, not uncommon. After all, among Havelock Ellis’s thousand or so British “geniuses,” 26 percent never married. In the academic and intellectual circles of which Hardy was a part, such a monastic sort of life actually represented one pole of common practice.
Thus, at Cranleigh School, all the teachers, except for the House staff, were men, most of them bachelors; dormitory masters had to be bachelors. Winchester was the same way. So was Cambridge. “In my day we were a society of bachelors,” wrote Leslie Stephen in Some Early Impressions of his time at Cambridge during the early 1860s. “I do not remember during my career to have spoken to a single woman at Cambridge except my bed-maker and the wives of one or two heads of houses.”
Not much had changed by the time Hardy reached Cambridge a generation later. Among the twenty or so colleges, two—Girton and Newnham—had been established for women in the previous two decades. But though women, with the lecturer’s consent and chaperoned by a woman don, could attend university lectures, by 1913 they still kept mostly to themselves and played little part in undergraduate life. Until 1882, college fellows couldn’t marry, but even after that most fellows remained bachelors. In 1887, a proposal was made to offer degrees to women; it was soundly defeated. Ten years later, on a May day in 1897, a straw-hatted mob thronged outside the Senate House, where the matter was again being taken up, demonstrating against the measure. A woman was hanged in effigy. A large banner advised (after Act II, Scene I of Much Ado About Nothing) “Get you to Girton, Beatrice. Get you to Newnham. Here’s no place for you maids.”
It was an almost laughably artificial environment, with dons left woefully ignorant of domestic life. One time at St. John’s College, the story goes, an elderly bachelor at High Table congratulated someone on the birth of his son. “How old is the little man?” he asked.
“Six weeks,” came the reply.
“Ah,” said the bachelor don, “just beginning to string little sentences together, I suppose.”
About the only time Hardy and other fellows encountered women was among the bedmakers who tidied up college rooms—and they were said to be selected for their plainness, age, and safely married status, presumably so as to minimize the distraction they represented to students and fellows of the colleges.
**
**
There was a hauntedness to Hardy that you could see in his eyes. “I suspect,” remembered an Oxford economist, Lionel Charles Robbins, who knew him later, that “Hardy found many forms of contact with life very painful and that, from a very early stage, he had taken extensive measures to guard himself against them. Certainly in his friendlier moments—and he could be very friendly indeed—one was conscious of immense reserves.” Always, he kept the world at bay. The obsession with cricket, the bright conversation, the studied eccentricity, the fierce devotion to mathematics—all of these made for a beguiling public persona; but none encouraged real closeness. He was a friend of many in Cambridge, an intimate of few.
In the years after 1913, Hardy would befriend a poor Indian clerk. Their friendship, too, would never ripen into intimacy.
