A Pair of Blue Eyes (Owc) * 2010

*A newly set and updated edition of the novel that marks the transition to Hardy's mature fiction. Its two central male characters draw on Hardy's own experiences as architect and writer. With new introduction, bibliography, and chronology, this is the
most critically up-to-date edition on the market.

New to this edition
*New introduction by Tim Dolin considers the novel's place in Hardy's fiction, the relationship between romance and realism it exemplifies and how it reflects the uncertainty of his position between the professions of architecture and writer, embodied in
the two central male characters.
*Up to date bibliography.
*New, fuller chronology.
*Reset text.

'Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.'

Elfride is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began the book during the first days of his courtship of his first wife Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little
experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice.

Written at a crucial time in Hardy's life, A Pair of Blue Eyes expresses more directly than any of his novels the events and social forces that made him the writer he was. Elfride's dilemma mirrors the difficult decision Hardy himself had to make with
this novel: to pursue the profession of architecture, where he was established, or literature, where he had yet to make his name?
'Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.' Elfride is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began the book during the first days of his courtship of
his first wife Emma. Blue-eyed and