The male giants of English literature have often made bad real-life husbands, and the vindication of their suffering wives has taken various forms. Thomas Carlyle, and posterity, might never have realized what a difficult spouse he was without the diary of Jane Carlyle, which the historian read with dismay after her death. Mary Powell, “Wife to Mr. Milton,” had her youthful ordeal imagined by Robert Graves in a witty first-person novel carrying that title. Now, in “Winter,” the English novelist Christopher Nicholson sets out to avenge (up to a point) Florence Hardy, the ­decades-younger second wife of the aged Thomas, as she endures the fall and winter of 1924-25 inside a storm of sickness, jealousy and anger.

At 84, Thomas Hardy has long since forsaken fiction for poetry, but his status as a Dorset sage still derives from such locally inspired novels as “The Mayor of Casterbridge” and “Tess of the d’Urbervilles.” Shrouded in a temperamental gloom that has only been deepened by World War I, he maintains an “unvarying routine” that maximizes time at his writing desk. Although he dislikes giving interviews, he enjoys being flattered and remains jealous of Rudyard Kipling’s Nobel Prize. His most frequent facial expression continues to be “one in which natural wariness and distrust concealed themselves behind a front of alert attention.” Inside Max Gate, his Dorchester home, Hardy exercises the petty tyrannies of crankiness and eminence, not allowing the chimneys to be swept, no matter how badly they draw, or the trees to be cut back, even though they bathe the house in thick shadows. He animistically insists that the pines and beeches would feel pain from the ax.

Florence Hardy has become obsessive about these unchecked trees, believing their spores to be responsible for a growth she’s just had removed from her neck. She covers the scar from her operation with a fox stole, but is still beset with misery and nerves, mistaking the sound of hedgehogs mating in the garden for the cry of a baby. Her 10-year marriage has turned into an imprisonment. She is now, more or less, merely her husband’s secretary, reading to him at night before they retire to separate rooms. Florence once taught school, but these days Hardy discourages her desire to write children’s books. He charges her with composing the first draft of his autobiography, but promptly recasts her sentences in his own voice. Max Gate is kept “like a shrine” to Hardy’s first wife, Emma, while he disguises the earlier marriage’s “mutual hostility” in the guilty, longing poems he still writes to her ghost. On each anniversary of Emma’s death, Florence must accompany Hardy to her predecessor’s grave.

And yet, for all her resentment at having to “live in the shell of his ownership,” Florence also wants to proclaim her own possession of the great man, insisting despite all that they “do love each other.” But by late 1924 it’s becoming impossible to maintain this illusion. The emergency that provides “Winter” its slender plot — a ­story line that adheres closely to biographical fact — springs from an amateur theatrical production of “Tess,” whose lead role will be taken by beautiful young Gertrude Bugler, wife of a local war hero and daughter of the very dairy maid who years before provided Hardy with the inspiration for his fictional heroine.