Five times 15.
Thank you, Rosie, for that very kind introduction.
I'm so happy to be here.
A bit nervous about being the first, but anyway, so I'm going to start to the beginning,
the inspiration for the book about Hardy women and it began with a pilgrimage to Max Gate,
which is the house that Thomas Hardy built for himself after he'd become fairly famous.
So I'm going to share a slide with you here and I wanted to just share this moment of the inspiration of the attic room.
So I had the tour around Maxgate and it was as suitably gloomy
as you'd expect and dusty and it was incredible really,
to see the room that test was, was, was written, composed in.
But the room that really captured my imagination was the attic room, probably.
I'm a huge fan of Jane Eyre, so I instantly think of Mad Women in the attic.
And when we were shown around Emma's Emma Hardy,
Tom's Hardy's first wife's attic room, she had two rooms.
You can see one of the rooms here, it really fired my imagination.
It really made me want to know more about why she went up and lived in the attic.
She did so for 14 years now.
@ the time I did not know that his second wife Florence also ended up banishing herself to the attic,
which seems really unfortunate that not one but two wives would, would do so.
But they did.