In the Library
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Thomas Hardy, 1873
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 9.5 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 41
- Length
- Length 130k words
£1.99
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It was a creature with eyes. The eyes, dead and turned to stone, were even now regarding him.
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About the book
Halfway down a Cornish cliff, a man clings to the rock above the sea, eye to eye with a fossil embedded in it: a small dead creature whose stone eyes watched this coast when the world was young. Hardy holds him there, one frightened gentleman pressed flat against geological time, until a human life has been weighed and found brief. Elfride Swancourt saves him, on a rope she tears and twists from her own underclothes. Her reward is a man who cannot forgive her for having been kissed before he arrived. Henry Knight wants a woman with no past at all, and Elfride's is a small one, tender and half innocent, and he undoes her with it by inches. Hardy went to Cornwall himself as a young architect and married the woman he met there. He knew what those cliffs look like with love on them, and he knew that two men can ride the same train out of London, arguing over which of them she loved, and never think to ask what else is aboard.