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ROMANCE NARRATIVE IN HARDY’S A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 September 2014

John P. Farrell
John P. Farrell*
Affiliation:
University of Texas at Austin
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Extract

Thomas Hardy came to the writer’s life with prodigious endowments and little self-confidence. His struggle with this unlikely predicament shows up repeatedly in his career, but nowhere so often as in its early stages. The “Studies and Specimens” Notebook, completed in the mid-1860s, bears touching witness to the labor of a greatly gifted writer teaching himself the very rudiments of literary form. The editors of the notebook speak accurately of the “diligence and doggedness” of his striving (Dalziel and Millgate xv). At the time his striving was dedicated to mastering poetry, the first and always most favored of his muses. But in 1867 “under the stress of necessity” he shifted his focus to “a kind of literature in which he had hitherto taken but little interest – prose fiction” (Life and Work of Thomas Hardy 58). With varying results he turned to writing novels, still testing his vocation until 1873 when he published A Pair of Blue Eyes, which, together with his impending marriage, fixed his literary course for decades to come.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 42 , Issue 4 , December 2014 , pp. 709 - 731
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2014 

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