A Pair of Blue Eyes (Oxford World’s Classics) (1873). We’ve written a longer summary of Hardy’s A Laodicean here, with an account of the novel’s themes.ħ. Add some telegrams and photographs into this belated sensation novel (the novel’s ‘villain’, Will Dare, is perhaps the first photographer in English fiction), and you have the recipe for an exciting, if unevenly paced, tale. It tells of Paula Power, the heir to her father’s fortunes made on the railways Paula is a modern woman in all sorts of ways – not least because she is the ‘Laodicean’ of the novel’s title (pronounced ‘LAY-e-de-SEE-un’, it refers to someone who is lukewarm in their religious faith) and appear to harbour a homoerotic attraction towards her friend Charlotte.

Although stylistically hardly the most sophisticated Hardy novel, this story of the modern world clashing with traditional values and customs is an entertaining Sunday afternoon read (as Hardy himself later said in the 1912 Preface to the Wessex Edition). He was ill at the time, and confined to bed, so his first wife, Emma, acted as his amanuensis. This is partly because he didn’t ‘write’ it himself – but before you accuse us of being an ‘anti-Bockhamptonian’ (or whatever the Hardyan equivalent of being anti-Stratfordian would be), we don’t mean he didn’t compose it, merely that he didn’t physically write down much of the novel. This is the only novel from the ‘London period’ of the early 1880s which we’ve included here, and although we can recommend those other novels, especially The Trumpet-Major (a pleasant pastoral tale set during the Napoleonic Wars), we’ve opted for this 1881 offering because it is so utterly unlike any of Hardy’s other novels.

A Laodicean: Or the Castle of the De Stancys (Penguin Classics) (1881). This novel is almost mythic in structure, telling as it does of how a sculptor, Jocelyn Pierston, falls in love with three successive generations of the same family.Ĩ. (He would turn to poetry instead, writing classic poems such as ‘The Darkling Thrush’ at the end of the century – though he’d started out writing poetry too, as his early poem ‘Neutral Tones’ demonstrates.) Whilst this is partly true, it’s not the whole truth: he actually went back to an earlier book which had been serialised in 1892 (under the title The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved) and revised it for book publication in 1897. It’s often said that Jude the Obscure (1895) was his last novel, and that after the negative reception that greeted that book Hardy resolved to give up writing fiction.

This novel has the accolade of being Hardy’s final novel. The Pursuit of the Well-beloved and the Well-beloved (Penguin Classics) (1897).

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