Endgames

Abstract

Ischaemic heart disease is a rare cause of death in Hardy’s fiction, far less common than the dreaded ‘chill’. It was, however, to be the ultimate cause of death of both Emma and Thomas Hardy, and of Hardy’s ‘rare fair woman’, Florence Henniker (CP 320; LY 230). Florence Hardy was carried off by that other twentieth-century epidemic, carcinomatosis. Jemima Hardy’s death appears to have been attributed to old age, even today quite acceptable at the age of 91. Thomas Hardy’s father was certified by Dr Fred Fisher as having died from ‘Atrophy of the Liver & Exhaustion’ (Millgate 1982: 325) — a solid nineteenth-century diagnosis. Hardy’s own death certificate also states a mode of dying in ‘Cardiac Syncope’ rather than a cause of death. There was no other identifiable family history of vascular disease, apart from his brother Henry suffering a minor stroke in March 1914.