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The Well-Beloved / The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved
Containing the 1892 serial version as well as the version that appeared in book form in 1897, this volume makes available one of Thomas Hardy's lesser-known works. At the center of the story is a sculptor obsessed with the ideal woman, who falls in love with three women in the same family, each of a different generation. Considering the storyline's possibilities, Hardy presents two different "what-ifs".
327 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1892
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3462 people want to read
About the author
Thomas Hardy
2,274 books6,744 followersThomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.
The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.
The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.
Excerpted from Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 217 reviews
August 16, 2025
As a means of justifying his transient lusts, 20 year-old sculptor Jocelyn Pierston has invented a metaphor--that of the "Well-Beloved." The Well-Beloved never takes permanent home in a single individual woman. First she is here in the buxom laundress, next she is there in the world-traveling heiress, and so on. The book is broken into 3 sections. In the first, predictably, when Pierston is in his twenties, the Well-Beloved is most fleeting. Tripping from one lust-worthy female to the next, then she is gone for weeks, perhaps months. Pierston is not a rake, mind you. He does not ruin women, as casual sex was said to have done to women in those days. In fact, to my reckoning, in the entire 60 year span of the narrative he gets laid once. The reason the metaphor is useful to him is because he is an artist who seeks to capture the Well-Beloved in his work. This is his passion, you see: Beauty. I don't believe I have ever come across such a well-written tribute to fickle, lustful solipsism in my life. As Pierston ages, in the two succeeding sections--where he is 40 and 60 respectively--he becomes especially fixed on a single family, the Caros, in whose three succeeding generations of lookalike daughters he finds his Well-Beloved embodied. Especially fascinating to me--for all the wrong reasons--was the sixty year old Pierston's attempt to marry a woman 40 years his junior. Yes, she is the final incarnation of his goddess. Here is the paradox though: the book holds you, it's prose narrative carries you along skillfully, while the protagonist grows increasingly creepy and isolated.
June 20, 2021
This was a bizarre little novel, following a sculptor on a lusty lifetime pursuit for his 'well-beloved'. This term describes, in essence, his ideal female partner and he, over the years, finds such a figure in three generations of women.
The subject matter made me feel a little queasy to read about, as it never seemed challenged in any way. I understand the age of this book is largely the cause of this, but a modern-day reader will find much to negate in this pages, despite the protagonist enjoying nothing more than the idolisation of these women.
Once the somewhat distasteful topic is overlooked and the story taken for what it is, it is actually an enjoyable one. The years flew quickly yet the novel never felt rushed. Hardy immerses the reader into the protagonist's head, which is a little initially disconcerting given his tendencies, but ultimately leads to a small measure of understanding as the novel winds down to a satisfying conclusion.
I have started my journey with Hardy at the end of his life's work, but the writing exhibited here has me eager to retreat into other of his infamous, earlier publications.
The subject matter made me feel a little queasy to read about, as it never seemed challenged in any way. I understand the age of this book is largely the cause of this, but a modern-day reader will find much to negate in this pages, despite the protagonist enjoying nothing more than the idolisation of these women.
Once the somewhat distasteful topic is overlooked and the story taken for what it is, it is actually an enjoyable one. The years flew quickly yet the novel never felt rushed. Hardy immerses the reader into the protagonist's head, which is a little initially disconcerting given his tendencies, but ultimately leads to a small measure of understanding as the novel winds down to a satisfying conclusion.
I have started my journey with Hardy at the end of his life's work, but the writing exhibited here has me eager to retreat into other of his infamous, earlier publications.
July 30, 2017
The Well Beloved is Hardy’s last novel (or his penultimate, depending on how you count); and it has a distinctly elegiac, valedictory feel about it. The ostensible theme is beauty and the artist’s—and lover’s—desire to possess and appropriate it; but it is also about ageing and memory and the vanishing of youth.
There is something of a presentiment of Proust about this novel, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Proust knew The Well Beloved and liked it. He has an interesting comment about it in a letter of 1910, which recognizes the thematic analogies between Hardy’s work and his own:
Je viens de lire une très belle chose qui ressemble malheureusement un tout petit peu … à ce que je fais: La Bien-Aimée de Thomas Hardy. Il n’y manqué même pas la légère part de grotesque qui s’attache aux grandes oeuvres.
Proust has a point about the grotesque. Hardy’s protagonist, Jocelyn Pearston (in the 1892 serialized version of the novel I read) or Jocelyn Pierston (in the 1897 revised book publication), pulls off the remarkable feat of falling in love successively with three generations of women in the same family with the same name, Avice Caro. Hardy manages the intrinsic farce of this situation well, at the same time that he works it for his deeper, philosophical themes (“Caro” means “flesh” in Latin, with all that implies.) When Jocelyn confesses to Avice Mark III that he has loved her grandmother and her mother prior to her, the girl asks sardonically whether he loved her great-grandmother as well.
Incidentally, I feel no qualms about giving away aspects of this novel’s—preposterous—plot, because plot is so little a part of it. It’s less a realist novel than a symbolist poem; or, better, it’s a strange mixture of the two.
On the “symbolist poem” side of the equation, one thing I liked about the novel was its impressive philosophical density, and especially the interesting, highly self-conscious way in which it engages with the Platonic theme of idealized love as a groping after divine or immaterial beauty. On the “realist novel” side, I loved its portrayal of the tiny island, or peninsula, of Portland, off the Dorset coast: the ancestral home both of Jocelyn and the various Avices, and home also to the famous Portland stone, of which half the great monuments in London are built.
Hardy portrays the tiny, fragile, vanishing island culture of Portland brilliantly, setting it off against the world of London drawing-rooms through which Jocelyn disaffectedly drifts. He yokes these worlds powerfully together through the detail of Jocelyn’s profession as a sculptor, linking him on the one hand to matter—the stone that his father and grandfather quarried on Portland—and on the other to form: the vapid, ideal, sculptural images of beauty with which Jocelyn delights the polite London world.
I thought of Michelangelo at points, reading this novel—both for his sculptural pursuit of beauty; and for his “grotesque”—or tragicomedic—real-life obsession with beautiful individuals, of which we catch glimpses in his poetry. Given Michelangelo’s well-known incapacity, or unwillingness, to finish artistic works, it is poignant that Hardy found it so difficult to find closure with this novel. Apart from the 1897 revision—quite major and structural—he revised it again in 1903 and 1912.
A more obvious parallel with The Well Beloved is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was published the year before the serial version of Hardy's novel, in 1891. A feature of Jocelyn's characterization that Hardy emphasizes is his unnatural youthfulness of appearance, well into middle age, reflecting his moral and emotional arrested development. The themes of the two novels are very close in some ways, although their plots have a very different arc.
A final comparison: I noticed that one reviewer on this site mentions the thematic echoes of The Well Beloved in Christopher Nicholson’s Winter, a fine biographical novel on Hardy’s late life. I was struck by that as well. Nicholson is clearly in dialogue with The Well Beloved in ways that I hadn’t realized when I read Winter a few years ago.
There is something of a presentiment of Proust about this novel, and I wasn’t surprised to learn that Proust knew The Well Beloved and liked it. He has an interesting comment about it in a letter of 1910, which recognizes the thematic analogies between Hardy’s work and his own:
Je viens de lire une très belle chose qui ressemble malheureusement un tout petit peu … à ce que je fais: La Bien-Aimée de Thomas Hardy. Il n’y manqué même pas la légère part de grotesque qui s’attache aux grandes oeuvres.
Proust has a point about the grotesque. Hardy’s protagonist, Jocelyn Pearston (in the 1892 serialized version of the novel I read) or Jocelyn Pierston (in the 1897 revised book publication), pulls off the remarkable feat of falling in love successively with three generations of women in the same family with the same name, Avice Caro. Hardy manages the intrinsic farce of this situation well, at the same time that he works it for his deeper, philosophical themes (“Caro” means “flesh” in Latin, with all that implies.) When Jocelyn confesses to Avice Mark III that he has loved her grandmother and her mother prior to her, the girl asks sardonically whether he loved her great-grandmother as well.
Incidentally, I feel no qualms about giving away aspects of this novel’s—preposterous—plot, because plot is so little a part of it. It’s less a realist novel than a symbolist poem; or, better, it’s a strange mixture of the two.
On the “symbolist poem” side of the equation, one thing I liked about the novel was its impressive philosophical density, and especially the interesting, highly self-conscious way in which it engages with the Platonic theme of idealized love as a groping after divine or immaterial beauty. On the “realist novel” side, I loved its portrayal of the tiny island, or peninsula, of Portland, off the Dorset coast: the ancestral home both of Jocelyn and the various Avices, and home also to the famous Portland stone, of which half the great monuments in London are built.
Hardy portrays the tiny, fragile, vanishing island culture of Portland brilliantly, setting it off against the world of London drawing-rooms through which Jocelyn disaffectedly drifts. He yokes these worlds powerfully together through the detail of Jocelyn’s profession as a sculptor, linking him on the one hand to matter—the stone that his father and grandfather quarried on Portland—and on the other to form: the vapid, ideal, sculptural images of beauty with which Jocelyn delights the polite London world.
I thought of Michelangelo at points, reading this novel—both for his sculptural pursuit of beauty; and for his “grotesque”—or tragicomedic—real-life obsession with beautiful individuals, of which we catch glimpses in his poetry. Given Michelangelo’s well-known incapacity, or unwillingness, to finish artistic works, it is poignant that Hardy found it so difficult to find closure with this novel. Apart from the 1897 revision—quite major and structural—he revised it again in 1903 and 1912.
A more obvious parallel with The Well Beloved is Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, which was published the year before the serial version of Hardy's novel, in 1891. A feature of Jocelyn's characterization that Hardy emphasizes is his unnatural youthfulness of appearance, well into middle age, reflecting his moral and emotional arrested development. The themes of the two novels are very close in some ways, although their plots have a very different arc.
A final comparison: I noticed that one reviewer on this site mentions the thematic echoes of The Well Beloved in Christopher Nicholson’s Winter, a fine biographical novel on Hardy’s late life. I was struck by that as well. Nicholson is clearly in dialogue with The Well Beloved in ways that I hadn’t realized when I read Winter a few years ago.
November 6, 2017
OKCUPID BYLINE: Pretentious sculptor seeks a pretty island wench, her daughter, and her granddaughter, to idolise pointlessly for over forty years with a view to never touching or kissing ever. No smokers or catfishers. Brunettes preferred.
July 24, 2024
2.5 Stars
I wonder if Hardy, at the end of his career, believed in love or thought it wholly unattainable. In The Well-Beloved, he seems to be saying that it is an ideal that we chase, but can never catch because it does not exist. In any case, our protagonist, Jocelyn Pierston, a budding sculptor, is incapable of loving a real woman. For him the “well-beloved” flits from form to form and serves only as an inspiration for his art, not for his life.
The young Pierston only wants what he does not have; as soon as he attains his desire, he rejects it. His childhood friend, Avice, is a sweet, innocent and unaffected girl, and he proposes to her, but she is disposed of easily when he is confronted with another alluring woman. It is only when he learns Avice is truly unreachable that he begins to ache for her. Once out of reach, she becomes a kind of ideal, the embodiment of his classical idea of the "well-beloved".
From the time Pierson discovers that his fickle idea of love has lodged itself in one person, the book almost becomes another story altogether. Pierston pursues his former lover in the persons of her daughter and then granddaughter, both of whom are the image of the first Avice.
I cannot say I enjoyed this book, and I generally adore Hardy’s writing. The problem, for me, was that I could never relate to Pierson on any level. He was such a blank character for me. I think this is because Hardy did not intend this to be a story about a man, but one about mankind, about unattainable searching, about the mistaken concepts of love and how they are tied to creativity. The part of Hardy that I most admire and am drawn to, his ability to create characters with both human foibles and redemption, seemed missing here.
The story is almost an allegory. It is The Picture of Dorian Gray without any of the wit or mystery of Oscar Wilde. Very early on I realized that it would not matter to me what happened to Pierson. He is obnoxious and his condition stirs no sympathies, even in the end when he begins to see for himself that he has wasted life and accomplished little. All my sympathies were with the women who crossed his path, but they were too sketchy and ephemeral to garner any true concern. Sadly, they, too, are cardboard cutouts.
This book was written between Tess and Jude, then amended and published after the Jude implosion. Hardy was definitely at a low point and cynical at this point in his life. I think that cynicism is evident in this work. It is the most flawed and least enjoyable of his novels, for me. Three more to go…hoping they each best this one.
I wonder if Hardy, at the end of his career, believed in love or thought it wholly unattainable. In The Well-Beloved, he seems to be saying that it is an ideal that we chase, but can never catch because it does not exist. In any case, our protagonist, Jocelyn Pierston, a budding sculptor, is incapable of loving a real woman. For him the “well-beloved” flits from form to form and serves only as an inspiration for his art, not for his life.
The young Pierston only wants what he does not have; as soon as he attains his desire, he rejects it. His childhood friend, Avice, is a sweet, innocent and unaffected girl, and he proposes to her, but she is disposed of easily when he is confronted with another alluring woman. It is only when he learns Avice is truly unreachable that he begins to ache for her. Once out of reach, she becomes a kind of ideal, the embodiment of his classical idea of the "well-beloved".
From the time Pierson discovers that his fickle idea of love has lodged itself in one person, the book almost becomes another story altogether. Pierston pursues his former lover in the persons of her daughter and then granddaughter, both of whom are the image of the first Avice.
I cannot say I enjoyed this book, and I generally adore Hardy’s writing. The problem, for me, was that I could never relate to Pierson on any level. He was such a blank character for me. I think this is because Hardy did not intend this to be a story about a man, but one about mankind, about unattainable searching, about the mistaken concepts of love and how they are tied to creativity. The part of Hardy that I most admire and am drawn to, his ability to create characters with both human foibles and redemption, seemed missing here.
The story is almost an allegory. It is The Picture of Dorian Gray without any of the wit or mystery of Oscar Wilde. Very early on I realized that it would not matter to me what happened to Pierson. He is obnoxious and his condition stirs no sympathies, even in the end when he begins to see for himself that he has wasted life and accomplished little. All my sympathies were with the women who crossed his path, but they were too sketchy and ephemeral to garner any true concern. Sadly, they, too, are cardboard cutouts.
This book was written between Tess and Jude, then amended and published after the Jude implosion. Hardy was definitely at a low point and cynical at this point in his life. I think that cynicism is evident in this work. It is the most flawed and least enjoyable of his novels, for me. Three more to go…hoping they each best this one.
September 18, 2008
I loved this book. It gives a completely different approach to love than I've ever read or imagined... not that you love a person, but the spirit of your well beloved will take their shape. It may stay in that form, or for jocelyn, it continually leaves one physical form and inhabits another constantly. Definitely an interesting concept. I find Thomas Hardy a bit hard to read, but he has the most amazing stories. It's definitely worth the read.
July 6, 2019
Η αμηχανία που αισθάνομαι είναι τεράστια και δεν ξέρω αν καν μπορώ να μεταδώσω τα ελάχιστα για το βιβλίο που διάβασα. Κατ’ αρχάς, είναι ειδικό βιβλίο και δεν απευθύνεται σε όλους: << Όταν έβλεπε κάποιους απ’ τους συνομηλίκους του πως τους φθονούσε, υποθέτοντας ότι αισθάνονται όπως έδειχναν ότι αισθάνονται. Είχαν πάει πέρα από τα παροξυντικά ρεύματα του πάθους και βρίσκονταν στα γαλήνια νερά της μεσόκοπης φιλοσοφίας. Αλλά αυτός, σύγχρονος τους, κλυδωνιζόταν σαν φελλός εδώ κι εκεί πάνω στους αφρούς κάθε φαντασίας, ακριβώς όπως κλυδωνιζόταν όταν είχε τα μισά χρόνια από σήμερα, με το βάρος διπλής οδύνης, καθώς αύξανε το θέαμα της ματαιότητας των πάντων >>. Για ‘μενα ήταν ένα βιβλίο που διάβασα σε 9 ώρες, στις οποίες δε λειτούργησα με κανένα άλλο τρόπο, που να παραπέμπει στις φυσικές δραστηριότητες και ανάγκες. Δεν έβαλα τυχαία αυτό το απόσπασμα. Όποιος το καταλαβαίνει με τρόπο που τα γράμματα δε μένουν σταθερά, όχι από καμιά τάχα μου ανείπωτη σοφία, αλλά το κατανοεί τόσο βαθιά που δεν παίρνει άλλο, είναι ένα βιβλίο που οφείλει να διαβάσει.
Για οποιονδήποτε άλλον, είναι ένα άρτιο λογοτεχνικό οικοδόμημα, ρεαλιστικής δομής, με ορισμένες νατουραλιστικές, νεφελωδώς, σκέψεις και βαθιά επηρεασμένο απ’ το Δάσκαλο, ακόμη και στη βασανιστική ακρίβεια και τον τρόπο να απευθύνει το λόγο με φρεσκάδα και φιλικότητα. Χωρίζεται σε τρία μέρη που θα μπορούσαν να διαβαστούν και ανεξάρτητα, μεταξύ τους, εκ των οποίων, το τρίτο είναι το λιγότερο καλό, αφού επί της ουσίας ο συγγραφέας στα 52 του ψυχανεμίζεται τη ζωή στα 62 και πατ��ει λιγότερο σταθερά, όπως βέβαια απέχει και πάρα πολύ από ‘μενα αυτό το τρίτο μέρος, χωρίς όμως να σημαίνει πως δεν περιέχει πολλούς φόβους και εμμονές κληρονομημένες απ’ τα χρόνια που διανύθηκαν ως τώρα.
Η περίληψη δεν παραπέμπει ουσιαστικά στο βασικό θέμα του βιβλίου. Όπως θα πει ο φίλος του πρωταγωνιστή, βιώνει ένα αίσθημα με νοημοσύνη. Είναι συνειδητοποιημένος στην ‘’αυθύπαρκτη’’ κατάσταση που κυνηγάει έξω απ’ τα σώματα και τους πραγματικούς ανθρώπους. Αυτό που δεν αντιλαμβάνεται, ούτε καν στο τέλος του βιβλίου που μετά από ένα ‘’συναισθηματικό’’ πυρετό χάνει όπως λέει μια ικανότητα, όπως έχασε ο Ροβινσώνας μια μέρα, είναι πως η ικανότητα του ποτέ δεν είχε καμία σχέση με το ωραίο, ή το κυνήγι του. Το ξέρω γιατί ακολούθησα όλη τη διαδρομή και χειρότερα απ’ αυτό, μου είναι οικεία.
<< αναγνωρίσεις του είδους αυτού, κοινωνικές διακρίσεις που άλλοτε ορεγόταν τόσο έντονα, έμοιαζαν να μην έχουν νόημα γι’ αυτόν τώρα. Επειδή ήταν κατά σύμπτωση εργένης, επέπλεε στην κοινωνία χωρίς ψυχικό αγκυροβόλι ή ιερό που να μπορεί να πει δικό του και από έλλειψη οικογενειακού κέντρου γύρω απ’ το οποίο να αποκρυσταλλώνονται οι τιμές, σκορπίζονταν ανέγγιχτες χωρίς να συσσωρεύονται και να προσθέτουν βάρος στην υλική του ευημερία.
Θα μπορούσε να συνεχίσει να δουλεύει με το σκαρπέλο μ’ όσο μεγάλο ζήλο θα δούλευε κι αν τα έργα του ήταν καταδικασμένα να μην τα δουν άλλα μάτια θνητών από τα δικά του. Η αδιαφορία αυτή για την ευρύτερη υποδοχή των ονειρεμένων του μορφών , του έδινε μια παράδοξη καλλιτεχνική αυτοπεποίθηση, ώστε να αδιαφορεί για τις διακυμάνσεις της κοινής γνώμης και να μην της επιτρέπει να διατυμπανίζει την έμφυτη κλίση του >>.
Και σε κάποιες στιγμές δε μπόρεσα να μην αναφωνήσω, πόσες πολλές και συγγενείς, οι συνειδητοποιήσεις του συγγραφέα, ή του ήρωα του, ειδικά στο δεύτερο μέρος του βιβλίου, μέχρι που θυμήθηκα ότι αυτό που μ’ έσπρωξε πρώτα να τον διαβάσω, ήταν η κοινή μας συνάντηση, με το μεγάλο, ανατρεπτικό φως, που λεγόταν Σοπενάουερ. Κι ίσως ο Χάρντυ, στην εποχή που γράφει, να είναι ευκολότερο να μεταδώσει αυτή την αλήθεια, που πολλοί αρνούνται να αναγνωρίσουν. Γιατί θα διαβάσεις σημεία, που αν θες να είσαι πάρα πολύ αυστηρός, θα έλεγες πως εκφράζουν φαλλοκρατισμό και φεμινισμό την ίδια στιγμή.
<< Υπήρχε μια παράξενη διαφορά στον τρόπο που έβλεπε την τωρινή του παλαβομάρα και τον έρωτα του την εποχή της νιότης του. Τώρα μπορούσε να είναι τρελός με μέθοδο, γνωρίζοντας ότι πρόκειται για τρέλα. Τότε ήταν αναγκασμένος να περνάει την τρέλα του για σοφία. Εκείνα τα χρόνια, κάθε ακτίνα λογικής πάνω στις ατέλειες της αγαπημένης του φρόντιζε να τη συσκοτίζει βιαστικά και με τρόμο. Παρόμοια διεισδυτική ματιά τώρα δεν ελάττωνε το ζήλο του. Ήξερε για τον εαυτό του ότι είναι πλάσμα μιας ορισμένης τάσης και το δεχόταν παθητικά >>.
Το βιβλίο αυτό, δεν απευθύνεται στον παθητικό αναγνώστη. Απευθύνεται σ’ εκείνο που χωρίς καμιά σύνεση, θα θελήσει να ανακαλύψει ποια πραγματικά είναι η Τρισαγαπημένη. Δεν απευθύνεται πάντως σε ιδιοφυίες, μόνο σε όποιον έχει αποφασίσει να είναι ειλικρινής με την πάρτη του και για πάρτι του.
Για οποιονδήποτε άλλον, είναι ένα άρτιο λογοτεχνικό οικοδόμημα, ρεαλιστικής δομής, με ορισμένες νατουραλιστικές, νεφελωδώς, σκέψεις και βαθιά επηρεασμένο απ’ το Δάσκαλο, ακόμη και στη βασανιστική ακρίβεια και τον τρόπο να απευθύνει το λόγο με φρεσκάδα και φιλικότητα. Χωρίζεται σε τρία μέρη που θα μπορούσαν να διαβαστούν και ανεξάρτητα, μεταξύ τους, εκ των οποίων, το τρίτο είναι το λιγότερο καλό, αφού επί της ουσίας ο συγγραφέας στα 52 του ψυχανεμίζεται τη ζωή στα 62 και πατ��ει λιγότερο σταθερά, όπως βέβαια απέχει και πάρα πολύ από ‘μενα αυτό το τρίτο μέρος, χωρίς όμως να σημαίνει πως δεν περιέχει πολλούς φόβους και εμμονές κληρονομημένες απ’ τα χρόνια που διανύθηκαν ως τώρα.
Η περίληψη δεν παραπέμπει ουσιαστικά στο βασικό θέμα του βιβλίου. Όπως θα πει ο φίλος του πρωταγωνιστή, βιώνει ένα αίσθημα με νοημοσύνη. Είναι συνειδητοποιημένος στην ‘’αυθύπαρκτη’’ κατάσταση που κυνηγάει έξω απ’ τα σώματα και τους πραγματικούς ανθρώπους. Αυτό που δεν αντιλαμβάνεται, ούτε καν στο τέλος του βιβλίου που μετά από ένα ‘’συναισθηματικό’’ πυρετό χάνει όπως λέει μια ικανότητα, όπως έχασε ο Ροβινσώνας μια μέρα, είναι πως η ικανότητα του ποτέ δεν είχε καμία σχέση με το ωραίο, ή το κυνήγι του. Το ξέρω γιατί ακολούθησα όλη τη διαδρομή και χειρότερα απ’ αυτό, μου είναι οικεία.
<< αναγνωρίσεις του είδους αυτού, κοινωνικές διακρίσεις που άλλοτε ορεγόταν τόσο έντονα, έμοιαζαν να μην έχουν νόημα γι’ αυτόν τώρα. Επειδή ήταν κατά σύμπτωση εργένης, επέπλεε στην κοινωνία χωρίς ψυχικό αγκυροβόλι ή ιερό που να μπορεί να πει δικό του και από έλλειψη οικογενειακού κέντρου γύρω απ’ το οποίο να αποκρυσταλλώνονται οι τιμές, σκορπίζονταν ανέγγιχτες χωρίς να συσσωρεύονται και να προσθέτουν βάρος στην υλική του ευημερία.
Θα μπορούσε να συνεχίσει να δουλεύει με το σκαρπέλο μ’ όσο μεγάλο ζήλο θα δούλευε κι αν τα έργα του ήταν καταδικασμένα να μην τα δουν άλλα μάτια θνητών από τα δικά του. Η αδιαφορία αυτή για την ευρύτερη υποδοχή των ονειρεμένων του μορφών , του έδινε μια παράδοξη καλλιτεχνική αυτοπεποίθηση, ώστε να αδιαφορεί για τις διακυμάνσεις της κοινής γνώμης και να μην της επιτρέπει να διατυμπανίζει την έμφυτη κλίση του >>.
Και σε κάποιες στιγμές δε μπόρεσα να μην αναφωνήσω, πόσες πολλές και συγγενείς, οι συνειδητοποιήσεις του συγγραφέα, ή του ήρωα του, ειδικά στο δεύτερο μέρος του βιβλίου, μέχρι που θυμήθηκα ότι αυτό που μ’ έσπρωξε πρώτα να τον διαβάσω, ήταν η κοινή μας συνάντηση, με το μεγάλο, ανατρεπτικό φως, που λεγόταν Σοπενάουερ. Κι ίσως ο Χάρντυ, στην εποχή που γράφει, να είναι ευκολότερο να μεταδώσει αυτή την αλήθεια, που πολλοί αρνούνται να αναγνωρίσουν. Γιατί θα διαβάσεις σημεία, που αν θες να είσαι πάρα πολύ αυστηρός, θα έλεγες πως εκφράζουν φαλλοκρατισμό και φεμινισμό την ίδια στιγμή.
<< Υπήρχε μια παράξενη διαφορά στον τρόπο που έβλεπε την τωρινή του παλαβομάρα και τον έρωτα του την εποχή της νιότης του. Τώρα μπορούσε να είναι τρελός με μέθοδο, γνωρίζοντας ότι πρόκειται για τρέλα. Τότε ήταν αναγκασμένος να περνάει την τρέλα του για σοφία. Εκείνα τα χρόνια, κάθε ακτίνα λογικής πάνω στις ατέλειες της αγαπημένης του φρόντιζε να τη συσκοτίζει βιαστικά και με τρόμο. Παρόμοια διεισδυτική ματιά τώρα δεν ελάττωνε το ζήλο του. Ήξερε για τον εαυτό του ότι είναι πλάσμα μιας ορισμένης τάσης και το δεχόταν παθητικά >>.
Το βιβλίο αυτό, δεν απευθύνεται στον παθητικό αναγνώστη. Απευθύνεται σ’ εκείνο που χωρίς καμιά σύνεση, θα θελήσει να ανακαλύψει ποια πραγματικά είναι η Τρισαγαπημένη. Δεν απευθύνεται πάντως σε ιδιοφυίες, μόνο σε όποιον έχει αποφασίσει να είναι ειλικρινής με την πάρτη του και για πάρτι του.
August 25, 2016
After watching Tess of the d'Urbervilles, I decided I’d have to read more by the author Thomas Hardy. What truly impressed me was Hardy’s ability to create such interesting characters and to explore human nature, especially within the confines of the social mores and expectations of Victorian British society. Interestingly, rather than focusing on the wealthy of the period, he focuses on the more common rural class. I love how he gently but harshly criticizes the expectations of Victorian society by placing his characters in unpleasant situations caused by these expectations.
One small bit that I found interesting along these lines is that a young man invites his fiance to a specific place for the island's traditional consummation of the engagement. However, she leaves him a note saying that, because of her "modern ideas", she has decided not to meet him because she'd rather save her virginity for marriage. Upon this moment, the rest of the young man's life hinges. But I found it interesting that some of the "modern" ideas of Victorian times were a turn toward a more conservative view of premarital sex. And Thomas Hardy spins the results of this one "modern idea" to an extreme that spans 40 years.
I love that this book’s full title is The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament. Within, the author explores of the extremes of a certain type of personality through his character Jocelyn. Jocelyn is prone to falling in and out of love constantly. However, nearly as soon as the person he’s fallen in love with takes interest in him, he falls out of love with them and in love with someone else. Jocelyn’s excuse for this phenomenon is that he’s only ever been in love with one entity (which he calls his “well-beloved”), but this entity flits from person to person. He hopes that one day this entity will fall on one person and stay there. How interesting the stories we tell ourselves to excuse ourselves from our actions.
I have a hard time believing Jocelyn’s prognosis of being in “love” with all these women. After all, he often loves them before he even really gets to know them or even meets them. I’d go only as far as to believe that he was addicted to feeling of yearning after someone. And I’d call that state “having a crush” rather than “being in love”. But I well know that feeling. One of my untold secrets is that, until I was in my late 20s, I always had to have a crush on someone, even if I was in a relationship with someone else. It was far more exciting to want and obsess over someone than to actually have them. I think it was when I realized I was addicted to this feeling that I finally was able to shed it. But I didn't go to the extreme of being a serial heart-breaker like Jocelyn.
Being a scientifically-minded person, I had to research the chemical stages of attraction, love, and relationships after reading of this person who was unable to stay in love.
1. LUST -- caused by TESTOSTERONE (plays a major role in the sex drive of both men and women) and OESTROGEN
2. ATTRACTION -- PHEROMONES (smell) can play a role here as well as APPEARANCE which can be a subconscious way of determining genetic compatibility
3. INITIAL GIDDINESS -- caused by DOPAMINE (a pleasure chemical) which produces a feeling of bliss, euphoria, craving, and addiction. This neurochemical appears to be associated with mate selection.
4. EXCITEMENT AND FOCUS -- caused by NOREPINEPHRINE (similar to adrenaline) which results in a racing heart, excitement, heightened attention, short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, and goal-oriented behavior.
5. ELATION -- caused by PHENYLETHYLAMINE (the product of mixing dopamine with norepinephrine) which produces elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, craving, loss of appetite, and focused attention.
6. OBSESSING OVER NEW PARTNER -- caused by lower levels of SEROTONIN
7. BONDING -- caused by OXYTOCIN (released as a result of physical touch and at sexual climax) produces feelings of satisfaction and attachment
8. MONOGAMY -- caused by VASOPRESSIN (antidiuretic hormone) continues to play a role in attachment
9. LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS -- assisted by ENDORPHINS (the body's natural pain killers released during sex and physical contact) which produce a general sense of well-being including feeling soothed, peaceful, and secure.
So I’m going to say that it was a sort of chemical addiction that Jocelyn and I had: an addiction to dopamine, norepinephine, and phenylethylamine . Unfortunately, Jocelyn stays addicted to these chemicals from his 20s through his 60s. But he never stays in love because he never allows himself to get to the point of developing any type of bond or long-term relationship. He’s no longer interested once the pursuit has ended.
Something else interesting about Jocelyn’s love addictions is that he’s attracted to the same genetic mix over and over again. There’s been research done that says that we are attracted most to those who are the best genetic matches to us. Our pheromonal attraction supposedly leads us to those who are the best genetic matches for our immune systems. There has been research showing that there is often a correlation between couples and their lung volumes, middle finger and ear lobe lengths, overall ear size, neck & wrist circumferences, and metabolic rates. Supposedly for the sake of genetic evolutionary purposes, we are attracted to people who look like our parents or who look like us. According to this, then, there’s a reason couples often look alike. They don’t look alike because they’ve been together so long; instead, they’ve been together so long because they look alike. So it would make sense that, if the attraction is a genetic one, that you’d easily find yourself attracted to several someones from the same genetic pool. That same something that attracted you to the first person would attract you again on a base level.
Anyhow, Hardy didn’t set out to write about the genetics and chemistry of love, but his personality sketch of Jocelyn nods in such a direction. It makes you wonder how a person could continue on such a loathsome path for so long and whether there’s ever a chance of redemption for them. Or are they cursed for a lifetime because of the way they threw away “love” so easily in their youth? Do the decisions that we make early in our lives follow us throughout a lifetime? Can we change? There are so many questions to ponder from a simple character sketch.
While not as complex and wrenching as Tess of the d'Urbervilles, this work will still keep me reading more works by Thomas Hardy. I have a feeling it’s going to be a very Thomas Hardy year for me. This is an author with whom I would love to have been a contemporary of and with whom I would have liked to have been able to strike up a philosophical correspondence. While I’m not generally a fan of realist authors, this one strikes a mental chord with me. I'm rounding up to 4 stars from 3.5 and plan to read everything of his I can get my hands on.
One small bit that I found interesting along these lines is that a young man invites his fiance to a specific place for the island's traditional consummation of the engagement. However, she leaves him a note saying that, because of her "modern ideas", she has decided not to meet him because she'd rather save her virginity for marriage. Upon this moment, the rest of the young man's life hinges. But I found it interesting that some of the "modern" ideas of Victorian times were a turn toward a more conservative view of premarital sex. And Thomas Hardy spins the results of this one "modern idea" to an extreme that spans 40 years.
I love that this book’s full title is The Well-Beloved: A Sketch of a Temperament. Within, the author explores of the extremes of a certain type of personality through his character Jocelyn. Jocelyn is prone to falling in and out of love constantly. However, nearly as soon as the person he’s fallen in love with takes interest in him, he falls out of love with them and in love with someone else. Jocelyn’s excuse for this phenomenon is that he’s only ever been in love with one entity (which he calls his “well-beloved”), but this entity flits from person to person. He hopes that one day this entity will fall on one person and stay there. How interesting the stories we tell ourselves to excuse ourselves from our actions.
I have a hard time believing Jocelyn’s prognosis of being in “love” with all these women. After all, he often loves them before he even really gets to know them or even meets them. I’d go only as far as to believe that he was addicted to feeling of yearning after someone. And I’d call that state “having a crush” rather than “being in love”. But I well know that feeling. One of my untold secrets is that, until I was in my late 20s, I always had to have a crush on someone, even if I was in a relationship with someone else. It was far more exciting to want and obsess over someone than to actually have them. I think it was when I realized I was addicted to this feeling that I finally was able to shed it. But I didn't go to the extreme of being a serial heart-breaker like Jocelyn.
Being a scientifically-minded person, I had to research the chemical stages of attraction, love, and relationships after reading of this person who was unable to stay in love.
1. LUST -- caused by TESTOSTERONE (plays a major role in the sex drive of both men and women) and OESTROGEN
2. ATTRACTION -- PHEROMONES (smell) can play a role here as well as APPEARANCE which can be a subconscious way of determining genetic compatibility
3. INITIAL GIDDINESS -- caused by DOPAMINE (a pleasure chemical) which produces a feeling of bliss, euphoria, craving, and addiction. This neurochemical appears to be associated with mate selection.
4. EXCITEMENT AND FOCUS -- caused by NOREPINEPHRINE (similar to adrenaline) which results in a racing heart, excitement, heightened attention, short-term memory, hyperactivity, sleeplessness, and goal-oriented behavior.
5. ELATION -- caused by PHENYLETHYLAMINE (the product of mixing dopamine with norepinephrine) which produces elation, intense energy, sleeplessness, craving, loss of appetite, and focused attention.
6. OBSESSING OVER NEW PARTNER -- caused by lower levels of SEROTONIN
7. BONDING -- caused by OXYTOCIN (released as a result of physical touch and at sexual climax) produces feelings of satisfaction and attachment
8. MONOGAMY -- caused by VASOPRESSIN (antidiuretic hormone) continues to play a role in attachment
9. LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS -- assisted by ENDORPHINS (the body's natural pain killers released during sex and physical contact) which produce a general sense of well-being including feeling soothed, peaceful, and secure.
So I’m going to say that it was a sort of chemical addiction that Jocelyn and I had: an addiction to dopamine, norepinephine, and phenylethylamine . Unfortunately, Jocelyn stays addicted to these chemicals from his 20s through his 60s. But he never stays in love because he never allows himself to get to the point of developing any type of bond or long-term relationship. He’s no longer interested once the pursuit has ended.
Something else interesting about Jocelyn’s love addictions is that he’s attracted to the same genetic mix over and over again. There’s been research done that says that we are attracted most to those who are the best genetic matches to us. Our pheromonal attraction supposedly leads us to those who are the best genetic matches for our immune systems. There has been research showing that there is often a correlation between couples and their lung volumes, middle finger and ear lobe lengths, overall ear size, neck & wrist circumferences, and metabolic rates. Supposedly for the sake of genetic evolutionary purposes, we are attracted to people who look like our parents or who look like us. According to this, then, there’s a reason couples often look alike. They don’t look alike because they’ve been together so long; instead, they’ve been together so long because they look alike. So it would make sense that, if the attraction is a genetic one, that you’d easily find yourself attracted to several someones from the same genetic pool. That same something that attracted you to the first person would attract you again on a base level.
Anyhow, Hardy didn’t set out to write about the genetics and chemistry of love, but his personality sketch of Jocelyn nods in such a direction. It makes you wonder how a person could continue on such a loathsome path for so long and whether there’s ever a chance of redemption for them. Or are they cursed for a lifetime because of the way they threw away “love” so easily in their youth? Do the decisions that we make early in our lives follow us throughout a lifetime? Can we change? There are so many questions to ponder from a simple character sketch.
While not as complex and wrenching as Tess of the d'Urbervilles, this work will still keep me reading more works by Thomas Hardy. I have a feeling it’s going to be a very Thomas Hardy year for me. This is an author with whom I would love to have been a contemporary of and with whom I would have liked to have been able to strike up a philosophical correspondence. While I’m not generally a fan of realist authors, this one strikes a mental chord with me. I'm rounding up to 4 stars from 3.5 and plan to read everything of his I can get my hands on.
November 5, 2016
Rather a weird Hardy... I loved the setting and the language, as always, was great, but the protagonist was quite unlikable and distinctly creepy, and there was only so long I could suspend my disbelief.
April 13, 2014
The Well-Beloved was Hardy’s last novel – serialised in 1892, and published in novel form in 1897. Following the furore that surrounded the publication of Jude the obscure in 1895, Hardy turned his back on novel writing, and devoted himself to his poetry for the remaining thirty years of his life. The Well-Beloved is a work that Hardy himself revised several times, in 1897 for the novel’s publication, and again in 1903 and 1912. The edition I read uses Hardy’s revised 1912 text.
Coincidently I recently read a novel called ‘Winter’ – about Thomas Hardy and his second wife Florence at the very end of Hardy’s life. Exploring the idea that his character Tess, was Hardy’s own ideal – his Well-Beloved, a character based upon a young milkmaid whose daughter was to later play the part of Tess in a stage production. Winter was therefore great preparation for re-reading this novel. A novel often categorised as being one of Hardy’s Romance and Fantasies. The themes that Hardy explores in this novel are not unfamiliar ones for Hardy readers; conventional marriage, the search for an ideal and the effects of the passage of time.
The Well-Beloved of the title – is an ideal, a spirit which the central character Jocelyn Pierston, believes comes to temporarily inhabit the physical form of subsequent women and girls. Structurally the novel is divided into three sections, charting Jocelyn’s romantic life at twenty, at forty and finally at sixty, the three stages of his romantic education with three generations of women. The story of a transient spirit transferring itself from woman to woman is of course is the story that Jocelyn Pierston tells himself and his artist friend Somers in order to excuse what is obviously his own flighty, inconsistent behaviour.
“She came nine times in the course of the two or three ensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as a pale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neither light nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her, corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises.”
Jocelyn is a sculptor – from a small “island” community, in fact a peninsular described by Hardy as the Gibraltar of Wessex – where a few families exist mainly by working in the stone quarrying industry, marrying and intermarrying for generations. The community have their own traditions surrounding betrothal which involves couples sneaking off together to fully consummate their relationship – thus making marriage necessary. Jocelyn has moved away from his island home, making his life mainly in London, he comes back from time to time to visit.
When he is twenty Jocelyn’s ideal of the Well-Beloved inhabits the form of Avice Caro – a girl he has known since childhood. Having asked Avice to marry him, the couple decide not to go through the form of traditional betrothal; Jocelyn later abandons Avice to run off with another woman, the daughter of his father’s greatest business rival, in whom he again sees the spirit of The Well-Beloved. In later years Jocelyn finds his Well-Beloved in other places and in other women, it becomes a more fleeting ideal with the passage of time. At forty Jocelyn returns to his Wessex home briefly, where he meets Avice Caro’s daughter Ann Avice and in her immediately sees the Well-Beloved again. In his sixties it is her daughter, Avice the third to whom he becomes briefly engaged.
With the passage of time Jocelyn comes to believe that the original Avice was the woman he least appreciated – the hereditary link between these three women seem in part at least, what draws Jocelyn toward them. These three stages of Pierston’s romantic education concludes with Jocelyn changing his attitude somewhat in the search for his ideal – contenting himself with affection and companionship with one single woman.
The premise of this novel is an odd one I suppose, and yet Hardy makes it work, allowing him as it does to explores those old familiar themes. This was my third reading of The Well-Beloved – a likeable enough Hardy novel although not a favourite of mine – I do think it offers us an interesting perspective on Hardy’s own attitudes to love, marriage and the pursuit of the ideal.
Coincidently I recently read a novel called ‘Winter’ – about Thomas Hardy and his second wife Florence at the very end of Hardy’s life. Exploring the idea that his character Tess, was Hardy’s own ideal – his Well-Beloved, a character based upon a young milkmaid whose daughter was to later play the part of Tess in a stage production. Winter was therefore great preparation for re-reading this novel. A novel often categorised as being one of Hardy’s Romance and Fantasies. The themes that Hardy explores in this novel are not unfamiliar ones for Hardy readers; conventional marriage, the search for an ideal and the effects of the passage of time.
The Well-Beloved of the title – is an ideal, a spirit which the central character Jocelyn Pierston, believes comes to temporarily inhabit the physical form of subsequent women and girls. Structurally the novel is divided into three sections, charting Jocelyn’s romantic life at twenty, at forty and finally at sixty, the three stages of his romantic education with three generations of women. The story of a transient spirit transferring itself from woman to woman is of course is the story that Jocelyn Pierston tells himself and his artist friend Somers in order to excuse what is obviously his own flighty, inconsistent behaviour.
“She came nine times in the course of the two or three ensuing years. Four times she masqueraded as a brunette, twice as a pale-haired creature, and two or three times under a complexion neither light nor dark. Sometimes she was a tall, fine girl, but more often, I think, she preferred to slip into the skin of a lithe airy being, of no great stature. I grew so accustomed to these exits and entrances that I resigned myself to them quite passively, talked to her, kissed her, corresponded with her, ached for her, in each of her several guises.”
Jocelyn is a sculptor – from a small “island” community, in fact a peninsular described by Hardy as the Gibraltar of Wessex – where a few families exist mainly by working in the stone quarrying industry, marrying and intermarrying for generations. The community have their own traditions surrounding betrothal which involves couples sneaking off together to fully consummate their relationship – thus making marriage necessary. Jocelyn has moved away from his island home, making his life mainly in London, he comes back from time to time to visit.
When he is twenty Jocelyn’s ideal of the Well-Beloved inhabits the form of Avice Caro – a girl he has known since childhood. Having asked Avice to marry him, the couple decide not to go through the form of traditional betrothal; Jocelyn later abandons Avice to run off with another woman, the daughter of his father’s greatest business rival, in whom he again sees the spirit of The Well-Beloved. In later years Jocelyn finds his Well-Beloved in other places and in other women, it becomes a more fleeting ideal with the passage of time. At forty Jocelyn returns to his Wessex home briefly, where he meets Avice Caro’s daughter Ann Avice and in her immediately sees the Well-Beloved again. In his sixties it is her daughter, Avice the third to whom he becomes briefly engaged.
With the passage of time Jocelyn comes to believe that the original Avice was the woman he least appreciated – the hereditary link between these three women seem in part at least, what draws Jocelyn toward them. These three stages of Pierston’s romantic education concludes with Jocelyn changing his attitude somewhat in the search for his ideal – contenting himself with affection and companionship with one single woman.
The premise of this novel is an odd one I suppose, and yet Hardy makes it work, allowing him as it does to explores those old familiar themes. This was my third reading of The Well-Beloved – a likeable enough Hardy novel although not a favourite of mine – I do think it offers us an interesting perspective on Hardy’s own attitudes to love, marriage and the pursuit of the ideal.
November 5, 2023
Thomas Hardy este unul dintre preferații mei in materie de clasici britanici, așa că am ținut morțiș să citesc și aceasta carte. Are dimensiunea unei nuvele și se parcurge destul de repede. In linii mari, cunoaștem povestea lui Jocelyn Pierston, un tânăr care este în căutarea idealului feminin, a Iubitei.
http://www.stildescriitor.ro/2023/10/...
http://www.stildescriitor.ro/2023/10/...
December 10, 2012
Intellectually I realised I probably shouldn't like this book as much as I did but I really enjoyed it. While the main character was a little silly I thought his idea of the beloved was interesting. I liked it on a spooky level, the idea that women were being possessed by the one he loved who kept moving. It had a touch of a ghost story. The fact that he was in love with something so ephemeral, and yet in reality became so obsessed with one woman he rejected that he became so infatuated with her daughter and her granddaughter was delightfully ironic. Of all the three "Avice's" I think I liked the 2nd one best. She was not the best educated, but when she came out of her mother's shadow she seemed to have by far the most spirit. Answering back, doing what she wanted, and of course chasing her own beloved. I thought it telling that the narrator didn't use her real name but also referred to her as Avice. I also liked the brief portraits of the minor characters that came in from time to time. Of course the fact that one man tried to get it on with mother daughter and grand-daughter is terribly creepy when you think about it. The fact that he failed every time made it amusing rather than sinister. I've been thinking a lot about growing up and growing old lately and I think this book did a wonderful job of examining this theme, almost more than it did looking at love, infatuation and obsession. I also found that Hardy's style was by far the most beautiful of any of his books I've read so far. It was stunningly visual and personal. Definitely recommended.
March 17, 2012
It was an absurd premise, yet Hardy came through, as he always does. The star-crossed lover Jocelyn starts out an idealistic young man, yet the long, dull march of time catches up to him in the end. I can't help but think this last of Hardy's novel is a reflection of his life at old age. The conclusion is especially sobering, yet welcomed, for it seems true, the best we can hope for in old age. Like "Far from the Madding Crowd" and "Tess of the D'Urbervilles", this is classic, sobering Hardy. Perhaps not as great a work as "Jude" or "Tess", nonetheless, The conclusion of Well-Beloved should stay with you long after you finish the final page.
unfinished
September 24, 2019I read the first 30 pages. Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor whose fame is growing in London, returns to “the Isle of Slingers” (Hardy gave all his English locales made-up names) for a visit and runs into Avice Caro, a childhood friend. On a whim, he asks her to marry him. Before long, though, following a steamy (for Victorian literature, anyway) scene under an upturned boat during a storm, he transfers his affections to Miss Bencomb, the daughter of his father’s rival stone merchant. The fickle young man soon issues a second marriage proposal. Thirty pages was enough for me.
September 23, 2009
I read this on the flight to London, and landing at 8am, looking down on those patchwork fields, I couldn't have felt more connected to everything English! This is in a similar vein to Tess, but much better developed story, and much more focused storytelling, probably because the main character is a man, and Hardy can handle him better than he could Tess.
February 5, 2014
I read a Penguin Classic edition that contained not just The Well Beloved, but also The Pursuit of the Well Beloved. But I did not read the original version but only this one. Hardy wrote the book between Tess and Jude, but heavily modified it after the publication of Jude.
The book is quite difficult to interpret. My introduction was by Patricia Ingham, which was a fairly conventional pomo-feminist interpretation. The book is about how men view women, at least in part, and the text exists in two radically different versions, so it was easy to write a pomo-feminist introduction, but I found it very unhelpful.
What attitude to take about what is going on, is quite difficult. In it the main character "falls in love" with three generations of women all of whom bare the same name, before marrying a fourth woman he had jilted earlier. His love for the three women named Avice is linked to his career as a sculptor. The three generations of women with the same name, give the book something of the flavour of a fairy tale and its fusion of the fairy tale with the 19th century realist psychological novel reminded me of Silas Marner.
In some sense or other the book is clearly about the platonic idea of different individual objects standing in as imperfect realizations of an ideal. Strangely, the book seems to suggest that what makes the main character a good sculptor is this pursuit of the ideal, however in his personal life he is somewhat of a fool and the women carry on their lives slightly affected by his behaviour but in some sense utterly oblivious to that ideal, which is presented as delusional. This all carries on until the main character abandons the pursuit of Avice, enters into a marriage with an elderly near invalid, abandons sculpture and becomes concerned about public sanitation.
That whole structure and message is very difficult to interpret. It could be read as an attack on the utility of art, but that is a little incoherent in an experimental and literary novel. It is also clearly about men's objectification of women and specifically sexual objectification, but presents it as ineffective and slightly ridiculous. The central character is neither particular sympathetic or villainous. It has a bit of the flavour of a satire about it.
I found it all a little hard to understand. It is still worth reading, but it lacks the seething emotional intensity and pessimism of Hardy's greatest works.
Hardy at his most baffling.
The book is quite difficult to interpret. My introduction was by Patricia Ingham, which was a fairly conventional pomo-feminist interpretation. The book is about how men view women, at least in part, and the text exists in two radically different versions, so it was easy to write a pomo-feminist introduction, but I found it very unhelpful.
What attitude to take about what is going on, is quite difficult. In it the main character "falls in love" with three generations of women all of whom bare the same name, before marrying a fourth woman he had jilted earlier. His love for the three women named Avice is linked to his career as a sculptor. The three generations of women with the same name, give the book something of the flavour of a fairy tale and its fusion of the fairy tale with the 19th century realist psychological novel reminded me of Silas Marner.
In some sense or other the book is clearly about the platonic idea of different individual objects standing in as imperfect realizations of an ideal. Strangely, the book seems to suggest that what makes the main character a good sculptor is this pursuit of the ideal, however in his personal life he is somewhat of a fool and the women carry on their lives slightly affected by his behaviour but in some sense utterly oblivious to that ideal, which is presented as delusional. This all carries on until the main character abandons the pursuit of Avice, enters into a marriage with an elderly near invalid, abandons sculpture and becomes concerned about public sanitation.
That whole structure and message is very difficult to interpret. It could be read as an attack on the utility of art, but that is a little incoherent in an experimental and literary novel. It is also clearly about men's objectification of women and specifically sexual objectification, but presents it as ineffective and slightly ridiculous. The central character is neither particular sympathetic or villainous. It has a bit of the flavour of a satire about it.
I found it all a little hard to understand. It is still worth reading, but it lacks the seething emotional intensity and pessimism of Hardy's greatest works.
Hardy at his most baffling.
November 29, 2017
Thomas Hardy produces a fairly short but interesting novel about a man who is cursed with falling in love with three generations of women, mother-daughter-granddaughter. Jocelyn Pierston is first introduced as a 20 year-old who is about to embark on a highly successful career as a sculptor. On a return trip to his native town, he reunites with Avice Caro, the same age, and they agree to marry. A chance encounter with another woman, coupled with Avice not arriving when she said she would, takes his life on a completely different trajectory.
The second, and longest, part of the book occurs twenty years later. This time, Pierston wants to marry Avice's daughter (the original Avice having died), but she is not interested in him. He ends up becoming a friend to her, and helps her get established in life by setting her husband up in business. The final part is Pierston in another twenty years, when he is now 60. Now he wants to marry the granddaughter of the original Avice, but she has no desire to marry a much older man and instead elopes with a man near her own age.
The ending is rather abrupt and, for Hardy, not very good. It almost seems as if he is not sure how the story should end, or rather at what point it should end. Pierston does ultimately get married - to the woman that he left the first Avice for forty years earlier. But by then they are both old and are content to live in close friendship. I guess in a sense it is a happy ending for Pierston as, after a lifetime of living alone and with regrets, he has at last found companionship.
Hardy has moments where he makes light of situations. On page 35, the young Pierston talks of a time when he was quite depressed and thought of taking his own life: "I went away to the edge of the harbour, intending to put an end to myself there and then. But I had been told that crabs had been found clinging to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in thereabout, leisurely eating them, and the idea of such an unpleasant contingency deterred me." But these lighter comments are relatively few and far between. This is a fairly melancholy story and despite it being about Pierston, I did not think that I ever got to know the character very well. Hardy did not make him, or any of the other characters, very deep. This is by far not Hardy's best work, but neither is it a poor effort.
The second, and longest, part of the book occurs twenty years later. This time, Pierston wants to marry Avice's daughter (the original Avice having died), but she is not interested in him. He ends up becoming a friend to her, and helps her get established in life by setting her husband up in business. The final part is Pierston in another twenty years, when he is now 60. Now he wants to marry the granddaughter of the original Avice, but she has no desire to marry a much older man and instead elopes with a man near her own age.
The ending is rather abrupt and, for Hardy, not very good. It almost seems as if he is not sure how the story should end, or rather at what point it should end. Pierston does ultimately get married - to the woman that he left the first Avice for forty years earlier. But by then they are both old and are content to live in close friendship. I guess in a sense it is a happy ending for Pierston as, after a lifetime of living alone and with regrets, he has at last found companionship.
Hardy has moments where he makes light of situations. On page 35, the young Pierston talks of a time when he was quite depressed and thought of taking his own life: "I went away to the edge of the harbour, intending to put an end to myself there and then. But I had been told that crabs had been found clinging to the dead faces of persons who had fallen in thereabout, leisurely eating them, and the idea of such an unpleasant contingency deterred me." But these lighter comments are relatively few and far between. This is a fairly melancholy story and despite it being about Pierston, I did not think that I ever got to know the character very well. Hardy did not make him, or any of the other characters, very deep. This is by far not Hardy's best work, but neither is it a poor effort.
January 1, 2011
Ah, my well-beloved Hardy! According to the introduction, this was the last novel he ever wrote, before moving on to just poetry, fed up with the scandal caused by Jude the Obscure. It shows, this novel is not as narrative, as intricately plotted as others of his: it really just wants to present a thesis, a preconceived idea: what if a man falls in love over his life with three different women from the same family? However, he falls in love with them while they are young and pretty, even if he is getting older! Well, to sum up, it is a bit like what we call in Spanish "una novela de tesis", a bit like reading Unamuno. Cerebral, conceptual.
In a way, it presents the life of a man as his failure in love, his failure to fulfill his love with any of the women with whom he falls in love. It reminded me of Any Human Heart by William Boyd, the adaptation of which we have just seen on T.V., where we also have an artist telling us the story of his life through the women he has loved.
The sense of place again is beautiful. It is set in Portland in Dorset, and there is an amazing initial scene on Chesil Beach that should make Ian McEwan jealous. How can a stranger manage to get so physically close to a woman in the nineteenth century? How can it be that -of course- at some point she will have to take off her clothes so a man can fall in love with her while putting them to dry?
Whenever the little action moved to fashionable London I lost interested in the story and it ceased to ring true or special. I think this was partly intentional. This artist is pulled to Portland, to his turf, all the time, a place where, as a friend points out, "a man might love a scarecrow or a turnip-lantern".
I was also very interested to learn about the rural custom of "pre-marital sexual intercourse to determine the fertility of a couple, marriage following on from the woman's pregnancy", as explained in the notes. Have I read about this in Hardy's other books?
In a way, it presents the life of a man as his failure in love, his failure to fulfill his love with any of the women with whom he falls in love. It reminded me of Any Human Heart by William Boyd, the adaptation of which we have just seen on T.V., where we also have an artist telling us the story of his life through the women he has loved.
The sense of place again is beautiful. It is set in Portland in Dorset, and there is an amazing initial scene on Chesil Beach that should make Ian McEwan jealous. How can a stranger manage to get so physically close to a woman in the nineteenth century? How can it be that -of course- at some point she will have to take off her clothes so a man can fall in love with her while putting them to dry?
Whenever the little action moved to fashionable London I lost interested in the story and it ceased to ring true or special. I think this was partly intentional. This artist is pulled to Portland, to his turf, all the time, a place where, as a friend points out, "a man might love a scarecrow or a turnip-lantern".
I was also very interested to learn about the rural custom of "pre-marital sexual intercourse to determine the fertility of a couple, marriage following on from the woman's pregnancy", as explained in the notes. Have I read about this in Hardy's other books?
March 14, 2011
This novel takes a look the temperament of a man in search of his perfect woman. Rather than being about that perfect woman it is more about the man who seeks her and his fickle heart. I have a tendency to believe that this novel was somewhat autobiographical of Thomas Hardy from what little I have read about his life.
May 2, 2013
A splendid late Hardy novel[1897 (revised from a 1892 serialization)], linked in spirit to 'Tess' and 'Jude'. Very interesting stucture as the hero is involved with mother, daughter, grand-daughter, each of them 20ish, in his 202, 40s, and 60s. Semi-autobiographical feel, about the spirit of love, art, and the search for a partner in one's own image.
January 29, 2016
A strange tale, beautifully told. I am impressed by how well Hardy knew the Bible.
May 17, 2025
3.5*-----I heard that Well-Beloved is one of Thomas Hardy’s more introspective and philosophical novels, a exploration of idealized love, beauty, and the fleeting nature of desire. Even tho this work of his not popular at all, this late-career work is quietly thought provoking and uniquely Hardy in its blend of romantic yearning and fatalism.
“I am sorry to shock you," she said. "But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and thirty years.”
The story follows Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor obsessed with capturing his vision of the “Well-Beloved” an ideal woman who seems to migrate between different physical bodies. His lifelong search leads him to pursue three generations of women from the same family, blurring the line between spiritual longing and self-deception. I loved this concept of art vs lust vs desire vs reality vs expectation theme, obsession of finding a well-beloved of men who is idealistic and perfect.
“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
What makes the novel stand out is Hardy’s thematic ambition. It reflects on the artist’s relationship with beauty, passion, and the dangers of placing ideals above real human connection. The setting of the Isle of Portland is so richly drawn and almost mythic, supporting the abstract themes.
“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
However, the novel’s weaknesses lie in its repetitive structure and emotionally distant characters. Jocelyn’s fixation can become wearisome, and some readers may find the premise more intriguing in theory than in execution. It also kind of feel very kinky, lustful and even disgusting to some people but I read this with open mind and for the philosophy as this is like 150y old. Problematic Obsession too is a issue you can face.
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
The Well-Beloved is uneven but meaningful a lesser-known Hardy work that rewards with patience and insight, even if it doesn’t fully satisfy on a narrative level. A solid 3.5 stars for its poetic atmosphere and philosophical depth.
“People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.”
The philosophy included
Idealism
Aestheticism
Romanticism vs. Realism
Ephemerality of Beauty
Platonic Love
“I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
Determinism
Obsession
Time and Transience
Identity and Projection
Art vs. Life
“But no one came. Because no one ever does.”
Conclusion
This book had 2 stories of the same plot and everything but I only read one because I dont want to read same plot same everything for another story. It will be boring.
I loved it kind off tbh even tho it is kind off boring for today age readers. I loved how it showed that unrealistic demand and imagination of men for a lover will cause nothing but devastation. There is no well beloved who is perfect.
I would love to read his more work.
“I am sorry to shock you," she said. "But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and thirty years.”
The story follows Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor obsessed with capturing his vision of the “Well-Beloved” an ideal woman who seems to migrate between different physical bodies. His lifelong search leads him to pursue three generations of women from the same family, blurring the line between spiritual longing and self-deception. I loved this concept of art vs lust vs desire vs reality vs expectation theme, obsession of finding a well-beloved of men who is idealistic and perfect.
“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
What makes the novel stand out is Hardy’s thematic ambition. It reflects on the artist’s relationship with beauty, passion, and the dangers of placing ideals above real human connection. The setting of the Isle of Portland is so richly drawn and almost mythic, supporting the abstract themes.
“It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”
However, the novel’s weaknesses lie in its repetitive structure and emotionally distant characters. Jocelyn’s fixation can become wearisome, and some readers may find the premise more intriguing in theory than in execution. It also kind of feel very kinky, lustful and even disgusting to some people but I read this with open mind and for the philosophy as this is like 150y old. Problematic Obsession too is a issue you can face.
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”
The Well-Beloved is uneven but meaningful a lesser-known Hardy work that rewards with patience and insight, even if it doesn’t fully satisfy on a narrative level. A solid 3.5 stars for its poetic atmosphere and philosophical depth.
“People go on marrying because they can't resist natural forces, although many of them may know perfectly well that they are possibly buying a month's pleasure with a life's discomfort.”
The philosophy included
Idealism
Aestheticism
Romanticism vs. Realism
Ephemerality of Beauty
Platonic Love
“I shall do one thing in this life - one thing certain - that is, love you, and long for you, and keep wanting you till I die.”
Determinism
Obsession
Time and Transience
Identity and Projection
Art vs. Life
“But no one came. Because no one ever does.”
Conclusion
This book had 2 stories of the same plot and everything but I only read one because I dont want to read same plot same everything for another story. It will be boring.
I loved it kind off tbh even tho it is kind off boring for today age readers. I loved how it showed that unrealistic demand and imagination of men for a lover will cause nothing but devastation. There is no well beloved who is perfect.
I would love to read his more work.
January 26, 2023
I chose to read The Well-beloved (rather than the earlier version The Pursuit) as it was said to be more feminist and this review is based on that. This is the story of a sculptor who falls in love with the ever-fleeting beauty in women (one after another) and never can find happiness until he loses that “curse.” It affects his work as an artist but ultimately allows him to find peace.
Not the strongest Hardy but very “Hardy,” nonetheless.
Not the strongest Hardy but very “Hardy,” nonetheless.
November 29, 2021
This was my least favorite Hardy book so far. I didn't find much connection to characters and because of that the emotional impact was lacking.
January 31, 2023
This is the very last of Thomas Hardy’s novel I had left to read, and its impact came with more of a whimper than a bang. The protagonist, a successful sculptor, chases an idyll of a woman over three generations of one family, only for love to ultimately elude him altogether. Beautifully written, of course, this novel was typical of Hardy’s style which is driven by irony, coincidences, and loss. Still recommended…for those who love classics.
September 14, 2021
Pretty good 3.5 stars
March 14, 2022
although it was good as a whole, it got a bit repetitive by the end. the repetition was necessary for the plot as the main focus was on how the Beloved decided to “torment” Pierston by going from one Avice to another, but I found the language repetitive as well. also the story flowed a bit abruptly often, and some things did not make sense. the book does have good quotes, amazing symbolism, and in its entirety an interesting plot despite the repetitive language and abrupt flow.
April 19, 2014
This comparatively short novel was first published as a serial in 1892. It is known now in the revised version of five years later, which in a way makes it later than Jude the Obscure and thus Hardy's "last" novel. Typically as to Hardy's body of work, it portrays a tragic romance that challenges traditional sexual morals such as, in this case, monogamy. Added to this is a poetic sense of fate, giving the storyline a touch of magical symmetry, like that of a fairy-tale or a folk legend. At the center of the tragedy is a sculptor named Jocelyn Pierston, whose eye for beauty is both a gift and a curse. For, whether you read it as a literal truth or merely as the self-justifying whimsy of a faithless man, he considers himself the faithful lover of an ideal of womanhood—he calls her the Well-Beloved—who possesses one woman after another, never staying long in the same fleshly tabernacle.
And so we look in on Jocelyn's career at three stages in his life: as a young man of twenty, a young man of forty, and a young man of sixty. You know he doesn't deserve it, but the years are kind to him. He really keeps most of his youthful good looks, so that even at sixty women find him reasonably attractive, and would be surprised to learn his true age. But he pays dearly for this, and for his artistic eye. It begin when he jilts a girl from his native Isle of Slingers (based on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, U.K.), a lovely being named Avice, with whom he has been a sweetheart off and on since childhood. Breaking their engagement to be married proves to be the great mistake of his life, but he is carried away by an appearance of the Well-Beloved in the statuesque figure of Marcia. Their marriage plans don't come off either, so Jocelyn throws himself into his art.
Twenty years later, and another twenty years again, we drop in to find Jocelyn being captivated by successive generations of Avices. Both the daughter and the granddaughter of the original captivate him as much as the original. A sad sense that the first Avice was really the love of his life, and regret for things that should have been but can never be, smolders beneath the tragedy of a man whose true love passes between three generations of the same family. The wrong that he did to the first Avice is repaid with interest—and with a beautiful symmetry that an artist must appreciate—as Pierston's desire to possess their great beauty is denied again and again. And when the vision finally deserts him, it is such a strange mixture of blessing and injury that it will stir both thought and feeling.
I read this book by way of Robert Powell's audiobook narration. In a medium I have known to reach fifty CDs, this book fit comfortably on six disks. Within these very modest dimensions, however, Hardy brings to life a memorable and distinct corner of his fictional county of Wessex: a wind-tousled, surf-spattered spit of stone, haunted by history, inhabited by gritty folks who have intermarried every-which-way and who all know each other's business. It is a striking setting for a tale that touches on the brevity of youth's bloom of freshness and beauty, the sportive pranks of a genius that endures through one fleeting represtative after another, and the length (for some) of a life full of regret.
And so we look in on Jocelyn's career at three stages in his life: as a young man of twenty, a young man of forty, and a young man of sixty. You know he doesn't deserve it, but the years are kind to him. He really keeps most of his youthful good looks, so that even at sixty women find him reasonably attractive, and would be surprised to learn his true age. But he pays dearly for this, and for his artistic eye. It begin when he jilts a girl from his native Isle of Slingers (based on the Isle of Portland in Dorset, U.K.), a lovely being named Avice, with whom he has been a sweetheart off and on since childhood. Breaking their engagement to be married proves to be the great mistake of his life, but he is carried away by an appearance of the Well-Beloved in the statuesque figure of Marcia. Their marriage plans don't come off either, so Jocelyn throws himself into his art.
Twenty years later, and another twenty years again, we drop in to find Jocelyn being captivated by successive generations of Avices. Both the daughter and the granddaughter of the original captivate him as much as the original. A sad sense that the first Avice was really the love of his life, and regret for things that should have been but can never be, smolders beneath the tragedy of a man whose true love passes between three generations of the same family. The wrong that he did to the first Avice is repaid with interest—and with a beautiful symmetry that an artist must appreciate—as Pierston's desire to possess their great beauty is denied again and again. And when the vision finally deserts him, it is such a strange mixture of blessing and injury that it will stir both thought and feeling.
I read this book by way of Robert Powell's audiobook narration. In a medium I have known to reach fifty CDs, this book fit comfortably on six disks. Within these very modest dimensions, however, Hardy brings to life a memorable and distinct corner of his fictional county of Wessex: a wind-tousled, surf-spattered spit of stone, haunted by history, inhabited by gritty folks who have intermarried every-which-way and who all know each other's business. It is a striking setting for a tale that touches on the brevity of youth's bloom of freshness and beauty, the sportive pranks of a genius that endures through one fleeting represtative after another, and the length (for some) of a life full of regret.
August 9, 2010
I find that whenever I pick up a work by Hardy, I know I’ll be reading something good. I’ve read many of his stories, and so far I’ve yet to be disappointed. His “last” novel is certainly not an exception.
I really liked that you get two stories in one with this book. It’s kind of like watching a remake of a film: It allows you to analyze the different takes on a scene, the subtle changes in the plot, and various modifications in the dialogue. In that way, I thought reading this book was a fun exercise, giving the reader a glimpse into the mind of the author during his writing process.
I have a feeling that if Hardy wrote The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved one hundred years earlier, I have a sneaking suspicion that it would have been better received. I don’t think that audience would’ve been as shocked or appalled by the story as Hardy’s more morally inclined Victorian audience. In summation, it has a rather grotesque plot: An old lecherous man lusting after three girls—grandmother, mother, and daughter—over forty years, masking his desire as a “search for the Ideal” woman: the Well-Beloved. To tell the truth, when I was doing research on Hardy, I was very hesitant upon reading this book; thought it would be too much for my sensibilities. But now I’m glad I did. I found that Hardy masked the grotesque nature of the story with humor. The book’s full of great lines that made me giggle. For instance,
“Well – though you seemed handsome and gentlemanly at first… I found you too old soon after.”
“But there was history in his face—distinct chapters of it; his brow was not the blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in his forehead; it had been ploughed in the course of a month or two by a crisis in his matrimonial trouble. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair… This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin….”
“Where have you been so long, Avice?” sternly asked the man of nine-and-fifty. “I will tell you,” said Sweet-and-Twenty, with breathless humility.”
“In its place was a wrinkled crone, with a pointed chin, her figure bowed, her hair as white as snow. To this once handsome face had been brought by the raspings, chisellings, stewings, bakings, and freezings of forty years. The Juno of that day was the Witch of Ednor of this.”
“I am sorry to shock you,” she said. “But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and-thirty years.”
Thomas Hardy’s truly a wicked man! *grins*
The Well-Beloved is certainly a better work than its predecessor. Here, Hardy allows the story to go full circle. Pierston’s early choices are revisited upon him as an old man. And Hardy’s not as cruel in his descriptions of aging and decrepitude. He also offers a better explanation for the actions of Avice the second in regards to her daughter. This Avice is more cunning and artful, exploiting her knowledge for her daughter’s gain and benefit. But I did miss the interactions between Pierston, Henri, and Avice the third that were in the first book, though I do understand why they were eliminated, since it wouldn’t have worked for Hardy's new overall plan.
Definitely worth the read, though I must say it’s not as good as some of his other novels.
I really liked that you get two stories in one with this book. It’s kind of like watching a remake of a film: It allows you to analyze the different takes on a scene, the subtle changes in the plot, and various modifications in the dialogue. In that way, I thought reading this book was a fun exercise, giving the reader a glimpse into the mind of the author during his writing process.
I have a feeling that if Hardy wrote The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved one hundred years earlier, I have a sneaking suspicion that it would have been better received. I don’t think that audience would’ve been as shocked or appalled by the story as Hardy’s more morally inclined Victorian audience. In summation, it has a rather grotesque plot: An old lecherous man lusting after three girls—grandmother, mother, and daughter—over forty years, masking his desire as a “search for the Ideal” woman: the Well-Beloved. To tell the truth, when I was doing research on Hardy, I was very hesitant upon reading this book; thought it would be too much for my sensibilities. But now I’m glad I did. I found that Hardy masked the grotesque nature of the story with humor. The book’s full of great lines that made me giggle. For instance,
“Well – though you seemed handsome and gentlemanly at first… I found you too old soon after.”
“But there was history in his face—distinct chapters of it; his brow was not the blank page it once had been. He knew the origin of that line in his forehead; it had been ploughed in the course of a month or two by a crisis in his matrimonial trouble. He remembered the coming of this pale wiry hair… This wrinkled corner, that drawn bit of skin….”
“Where have you been so long, Avice?” sternly asked the man of nine-and-fifty. “I will tell you,” said Sweet-and-Twenty, with breathless humility.”
“In its place was a wrinkled crone, with a pointed chin, her figure bowed, her hair as white as snow. To this once handsome face had been brought by the raspings, chisellings, stewings, bakings, and freezings of forty years. The Juno of that day was the Witch of Ednor of this.”
“I am sorry to shock you,” she said. “But the moth eats the garment somewhat in five-and-thirty years.”
Thomas Hardy’s truly a wicked man! *grins*
The Well-Beloved is certainly a better work than its predecessor. Here, Hardy allows the story to go full circle. Pierston’s early choices are revisited upon him as an old man. And Hardy’s not as cruel in his descriptions of aging and decrepitude. He also offers a better explanation for the actions of Avice the second in regards to her daughter. This Avice is more cunning and artful, exploiting her knowledge for her daughter’s gain and benefit. But I did miss the interactions between Pierston, Henri, and Avice the third that were in the first book, though I do understand why they were eliminated, since it wouldn’t have worked for Hardy's new overall plan.
Definitely worth the read, though I must say it’s not as good as some of his other novels.
January 13, 2014
Atonement By Marriage
This novel, which depicts a young man's lifelong search for the feminine Ideal, represents the latter end of Hardy's literary output, as he was turning to the poetic genre. First appearing in serialized form in the London News in 1892, this story was written between TESS and JUDE. By the time it assumed final book form in 1897 it had undergone extensive revision. This is the heart-wrenching story of a passive native of the Isle of the Slingers, just south of London (accessible via a railroad causeway.) The three major sections of the novel are chronologically spaced twenty years apart, featuring the protagonist at 20, 40 and at 60. Young Jocelyn Pierston courts Avice of the Isle, but her delicate refusal to meet him one night on the beach inadvertently precipitates his flight with another young woman, whom he was courteously trying to help in a storm. The plot offers frequent instances of coincidence, bad timing, and poor choices which cause inevitable misunderstanding and ironic plotting.
Fate seems to provide the wrong mate at crucial junctures in his life, and that of the three women he courts. It is almost ridiculous and pathetic that Pierson attempts to marry the daughter (and even the grand-daughter) of the woman to whom he first spontaneously proposed. Additionally there are distinct undercurrents interwoven in THE WELL BELOVED: the bond between the sculptor's Hands, striving to recreate in stone the perfection which his Heart desperately seeks in various female forms. There is also the interplay between Rock: the granite island, his artistic medium and his steadfast determination to seek the Ideal Woman for the rest of his days versus Water: restless Ocean
brine which tirelessly seeks to reduce the granite to pebbles, salty straits which provide a psychological barrier between islander and mainlander; the Well water so crucial to village life; and lastly the Tears of a woman abandoned--guilty of selfishness or married to a battering husband. This Native often returns to his island home, to find surprising changes on the Isle of quarries and masons, yet he is perplexed to discover that some things are timeless. Pierston has achieved artistic recognition as evidenced by being named an Academician, yet he privately is tortured by the Curse (his deepest secret) of his all-consuming quest for the Ideal. The only way Pierston can be freed of 40 years of bondage to heartache is to accept the fact that he has lost all chances of claming an Avice as his bride. Unfortunately, this emotional freedom is purchased at the cost of his talent. Will he merely fade into the granite twilight of his native isle, a sadder but wiser aging man who recognizes his physical limitations and accepts the ravages of time? A thought-provoking read, lightly based on the author's own situation, concerning the eternal yearnings of the human heart.
(July 31, 2012)
This novel, which depicts a young man's lifelong search for the feminine Ideal, represents the latter end of Hardy's literary output, as he was turning to the poetic genre. First appearing in serialized form in the London News in 1892, this story was written between TESS and JUDE. By the time it assumed final book form in 1897 it had undergone extensive revision. This is the heart-wrenching story of a passive native of the Isle of the Slingers, just south of London (accessible via a railroad causeway.) The three major sections of the novel are chronologically spaced twenty years apart, featuring the protagonist at 20, 40 and at 60. Young Jocelyn Pierston courts Avice of the Isle, but her delicate refusal to meet him one night on the beach inadvertently precipitates his flight with another young woman, whom he was courteously trying to help in a storm. The plot offers frequent instances of coincidence, bad timing, and poor choices which cause inevitable misunderstanding and ironic plotting.
Fate seems to provide the wrong mate at crucial junctures in his life, and that of the three women he courts. It is almost ridiculous and pathetic that Pierson attempts to marry the daughter (and even the grand-daughter) of the woman to whom he first spontaneously proposed. Additionally there are distinct undercurrents interwoven in THE WELL BELOVED: the bond between the sculptor's Hands, striving to recreate in stone the perfection which his Heart desperately seeks in various female forms. There is also the interplay between Rock: the granite island, his artistic medium and his steadfast determination to seek the Ideal Woman for the rest of his days versus Water: restless Ocean
brine which tirelessly seeks to reduce the granite to pebbles, salty straits which provide a psychological barrier between islander and mainlander; the Well water so crucial to village life; and lastly the Tears of a woman abandoned--guilty of selfishness or married to a battering husband. This Native often returns to his island home, to find surprising changes on the Isle of quarries and masons, yet he is perplexed to discover that some things are timeless. Pierston has achieved artistic recognition as evidenced by being named an Academician, yet he privately is tortured by the Curse (his deepest secret) of his all-consuming quest for the Ideal. The only way Pierston can be freed of 40 years of bondage to heartache is to accept the fact that he has lost all chances of claming an Avice as his bride. Unfortunately, this emotional freedom is purchased at the cost of his talent. Will he merely fade into the granite twilight of his native isle, a sadder but wiser aging man who recognizes his physical limitations and accepts the ravages of time? A thought-provoking read, lightly based on the author's own situation, concerning the eternal yearnings of the human heart.
(July 31, 2012)
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