Every bereavement is a kind of ghost story. When Thomas Hardy’s wife Emma died unexpectedly in 1912, her loss unstoppered a flood of poetry in Hardy. Taken together, his poems about Emma constitute one of the greatest series of elegies in English, a complex exploration of nostalgia, regret, self-recrimination, self-mythologising, bitterness and yearning. They are the record of a haunting. Which all came as a most unpleasant irony to the second Mrs Hardy …

A collaboration with Mark Ford, whose book examining Hardy’s Emma poems, Women Much Missed, was published by OUP in 2023, Dead Poets Live return to The Coronet with a ghost story which is also a love story – a dramatization of a poet haunted into his greatest work.