Jane met Jonathan when, to give her a break from the constant demands of caring for Stephen, a friend suggested she should take up singing in the local church choir, run by Jonathan. It was 1977. Jane and first husband Stephen Hawking, then parents of two young children, were living in Cambridge, where he was garnering a reputation as one of the most glittering scientists of his generation. Jane, though, was isolated and overwrought. How much were the demands on their marriage the product of Stephen’s disease – without it, might they still be married today? Jane isn’t sure: although his health was a huge strain, there were others. From the outset, Stephen’s “eccentric” family made no secret of the fact that they didn’t think the marriage would survive.
One of Stepehn's nurses, Elaine Mason, went on to become his second wife, though the two later divorced. This is an episode of their lives Jane is reluctant to rake over, although it was this relationship that tipped the Hawkings into splitting up, rather than her relationship with Jonathan. Why did they carry on for so long, even after she had met Jonathan and become close to him? She says it never felt like a choice: she loved Jonathan and depended on him for support, but she absolutely loved Stephen as well.
“There was no alternative to just carrying on. I felt very committed to Stephen, and I didn’t think he could manage without me. I wanted him to carry on doing his amazing work, and I wanted the children to have a stable family behind them – so we just carried on.”
In real life, as in the film, Jonathan became part of the family, sharing the workload of caring for Stephen with Jane, and helping bring up the children. He had been widowed a couple of years before they met. “What brought us together,” says Jane, “was loneliness. We were both very lonely people, and then we found one another.”
So the formal split in the Hawkings’ marriage didn’t come until the early 1990s, by which time the oldest children were in their late teens and 20s and the youngest late addition, Timothy, was 10. In real life, as in the film, Jane says there is no doubt that Timothy is Stephen’s child, not Jonathan’s. She is proud of the way she and Stephen and Jonathan kept their lives on an even track for so long. “But once the breakup happened, things absolutely exploded. The lines of communication became much more difficult for a while.”
Even when a marriage has petered out gradually, it still takes time to recover, she says. “They reckon you have to allow at least one year for every five years of marriage to recover before you can pick up the reins and find yourself again.”
Jane and Jonathan eventually married in 1997. How has that union compared with her first one? “I don’t think of my life as having two marriages, I think of it as a continuum,” she says. “We all lived in such harmony, and for so long, until the divorce and the disruption.”
But her two relationships have been very different. “I’ve been able to lean on Jonathan – we can lean on one another,” she says.
Now 71, she and Jonathan divide their life between Cambridge and their house in northern France, and she makes regular visits to Seattle where her and Stephen’s eldest child, Robert, works for Microsoft and has a son and a daughter.