A Pair of Blue Eyes (Penguin Classics)

Now, I am enjoying his stories that I missed.

One person found this helpful. This is another of Thomas Hardy's romantic novels. I was not disappointed but was surprised by how he ended the story. As an author, I know we write from our experiences. Thomas Hardy is a man I would have liked to know. However, it has a charm all of its own, with possibly the most ingenious ending of any of Hardy's books.

Like much of Hardy's work, some of the characters' prejudices and attitudes are barely credible in the modern world, and this is probably its biggest flaw, although not Hardy's fault given that he wrote it in the 19th century. If you can suspend disbelief, this is a meticulously-plotted story with a real emotional pull.

Elfride Swancourt, the central female figure; Stephen Smith, who may be a stand-in for a youthful and charmingly naive Hardy himself; or Henry Knight, who resembles Hardy's mentor and friend Horace Moule, an older man more worldly, experienced, and intellectually sophisticated than the author in his early twenties. Then there's Elfride's father, the ironically-named Christopher Swancourt, the socially ambitious and self-promoting Anglican country vicar, who hovers over the others' lives like a dark cloud. The novel develops like a romance, with attractive though flawed male characters competing for the affection of a sweet, naive, but fetching female.

The novel's progress is anything but conventionally romantic, however; its conclusion leads the reader far off the romantic path to an ending that explodes all the characters' hopes and expectations, and likely the reader's as well.

Elfride's life and Tess's warrant equally close scrutiny, and both characters reveal Hardy's developing sympathetic envisioning of the lives of young women, their choices concerning lovers and marital partners, and the ways in which their circumstances as women deprive them of the choices they deserve. The far-western English landscape -- Cornwall -- in which Elfride Swancourt lives her life is beautiful, harsh, and ruthless, not unlike the patriarchal social order that governs her being. This novel is more than a good read; it's gripping and mind-bending, for luke-warm Hardy readers or even for his most passionate fans.

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The final pages will grab you like a hand you didn't know was hovering over your shoulder. See all 6 reviews. Amazon Giveaway allows you to run promotional giveaways in order to create buzz, reward your audience, and attract new followers and customers. Learn more about Amazon Giveaway. Pair of Blue Eyes Wordsworth Classics. Set up a giveaway. Customers who viewed this item also viewed. Jude the Obscure Penguin Classics. Pages with related products. See and discover other items: There's a problem loading this menu right now.

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Don't have a Kindle? Product details Reading level: Penguin; 6th printing edition 26 March Language: Be the first to review this item Amazon Bestsellers Rank: Share your thoughts with other customers. Write a product review. Most helpful customer reviews on Amazon. The plot concerns the love triangle between Elfrida Swancourt and two suitors. The first man is Stephen Smith who as an assistant architect meets Elfrida when he encounters her on a church restoration project in distant Wessex.

He is a literary Hamlet type. Smith is similar in personality to the young Hardy who met his first wife Emma Gifford while on an architectural assignment. The book is filled with humor but ends in tragedy. The scene where Knight is rescued by Elfrida by her using her clothing to bring up to safety after he hangs on a cliff shocked Victorian sensibilities. Hardy considered this novel to be a romance and his writing is beautifully rendered.

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The novel is considered minor Hardy but it is still much better than the vast majority of modern novels published in the present day. I have been a Hardy fan for at least fifty years and he resides along with Austen, Dickens and Trollope as one of my favorite English authors. Not as good as the classic Thomas Hardy novels like Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the D'Urbervilles, this novel held my interest throughout, and elicited empathy from this reader for the three main characters. Especially when you consider the junky popular fiction that surrounds us. Hardy is a developing novelist in "A Pair of Blue Eyes" and the Oxford edition has an interesting essay about the autobiographical elements of the text.

The story of Elfride, Stephen and Henry is moving and at times quite mesmorizing.

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Although the story doesn't carry the same level of passionate angst between Eustacia and Wildeve in "The Return of the Native", this fine novel is obviously an exercise for Hardy to hone those writing skills that later left us some of the greatest novels in the English language. For me, the famous "cliffhanger" scene lived up to my expectations, although I was surprised that it does not occur near the novel's end. Then I learned that the novel first appeared in serialized form, so Hardy literally left English readers "hanging", not knowing what was going to happen to Henry who was hanging off a cliff while Elfride looks on.

The final 10 or 15 pages made me hold my breath as I waited to see the conclusion of the novel, even though Hardy doesn't make great efforts to hide the outcome from the reader. A great book is one in which we feel compelled to finish as quickly as we can, even though we may already know the outcome of the story. For me, then, this is a great book! I thought I had read all of Hardy when I found this one. It's amazing how many coincidences there are in the plot, but it's still believable.

This guy was a genius. It is almost a mystery. Characters start out likable, but end up pathetic. A sad tale, but a page turner. Thomas Hardy longed to be a poet and wrote novels reluctantly to make a living by the pen until his poetry found a market. Fortunately for him, he proved a better novelist than a poet and found a wide audience.

His literary reputation flagged for a while after World War I, and his ponderous style and occasional purple passages were often pilloried or parodied even during his lifetime.