A dead wife's ghost haunts England's greatest novelist — through poetry he can never escape.
Drama documentary from 1978 exploring the private feelings of novelist Thomas Hardy through the poems of love and remorse that he wrote after the death of his first wife, Emma.
Acting
Billie Whitelaw's Emma — present even in absence.
Direction
Powell treats poetry like found footage from a marriage's wreckage.
Director
Tristram Powell
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This BBC production arrived during a 1970s Hardy revival, when literary television treated viewers as adults capable of sitting with ambiguity.
Hardy had Emma's body exhumed and her heart removed for separate burial — the film's elegiac tone deliberately omits this gothic detail.
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