Tay
17th April 2011, 04:27 PM
Originally published in serial form in 1892 this is another story of love and lost love. A reviewer of the time denounced the book saying
Of all the sex mania in fiction we have no hesitation in pronouncing the most unpleasant to be the Wessex-mania of Mr Thomas Hardy.
Hardy himself called the novel “a fanciful, tragi-comic, half allegorical tale” and he placed it in the company of his other ‘romances and fantasies’.
Split into three sections, a man at twenty then forty and finally sixty. The young man is Jocelyn Pierston, “a sculptor of budding fame”.
We follow his life through the three stages, as he falls in and out of love, usually with the wrong person. He is searching for his ‘well beloved’.
In the same way we are as teenagers our fancy flits from one pretty face to another in constant searching for the one – the well beloved – Jocelyn keeps searching throughout his life, keeps seeing his well beloved in unsuitable, unattainable faces.
Hardy had long thought men are looking for the unattainable, searching for a perfection they would never find and in so doing discard what they love or could come to love.
There are aspects of Hardy’s life in this novel, his childless and largely loveless marriage to Emma Gifford, his love for an aristocratic lady who respected him as a novelist but had no love for him as a man.
Proust describes this work as ‘very beautiful’ and D.H. Lawrence as ‘sheer rubbish, fatuity’. For me anything Lawrence disliked is always a good place to start.
Apart from Tess and Far from the Madding Crowd, which were my first wanderings into Hardy country I’ve read all of his novels in chronological order. This, his penultimate novel, is full of humour and irony, the work of a writer in full command of his craft. If you like Hardy, if you like slipping back through the years to a slower pace of life, to a time of consideration. An era when the seasons still held sway over life and time enveloped not swept along; you’ll enjoy this novel. If you don’t then this won’t change your mind about Thomas Hardy. Oh and of course you won’t find any sex either!
Of all the sex mania in fiction we have no hesitation in pronouncing the most unpleasant to be the Wessex-mania of Mr Thomas Hardy.
Hardy himself called the novel “a fanciful, tragi-comic, half allegorical tale” and he placed it in the company of his other ‘romances and fantasies’.
Split into three sections, a man at twenty then forty and finally sixty. The young man is Jocelyn Pierston, “a sculptor of budding fame”.
We follow his life through the three stages, as he falls in and out of love, usually with the wrong person. He is searching for his ‘well beloved’.
In the same way we are as teenagers our fancy flits from one pretty face to another in constant searching for the one – the well beloved – Jocelyn keeps searching throughout his life, keeps seeing his well beloved in unsuitable, unattainable faces.
Hardy had long thought men are looking for the unattainable, searching for a perfection they would never find and in so doing discard what they love or could come to love.
There are aspects of Hardy’s life in this novel, his childless and largely loveless marriage to Emma Gifford, his love for an aristocratic lady who respected him as a novelist but had no love for him as a man.
Proust describes this work as ‘very beautiful’ and D.H. Lawrence as ‘sheer rubbish, fatuity’. For me anything Lawrence disliked is always a good place to start.
Apart from Tess and Far from the Madding Crowd, which were my first wanderings into Hardy country I’ve read all of his novels in chronological order. This, his penultimate novel, is full of humour and irony, the work of a writer in full command of his craft. If you like Hardy, if you like slipping back through the years to a slower pace of life, to a time of consideration. An era when the seasons still held sway over life and time enveloped not swept along; you’ll enjoy this novel. If you don’t then this won’t change your mind about Thomas Hardy. Oh and of course you won’t find any sex either!