The year: 1910, or thereabouts. The scene: a gloomy drawing room in a large country house, through whose windows the audience is able to see the reason for the murk in the form of a veritable forest of dark and brooding conifers.
Whether this badness encompassed the fact that he'd recently fallen for yet another younger woman, our typist Florence Dugdale, is moot: rather cleverly, Florence had befriended Emma, which had given Hardy licence to install her in Max Gate as his secretary. But either way, the mood was pretty extraordinary. In 1912, by which time Florence had departed for a period after a terrible marital row, Edmund Gosse and AC Benson (my cast list's literary figures) came to visit.
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