A pair of blue eyes

About the book

Elfride Swancourt's secluded life changes when Stephen Smith arrives to assist with architectural work at the church associated with her father. Their attachment must negotiate class expectations and what each family considers a suitable future. Henry Knight's later place in Elfride's life introduces another kind of authority: the confidence of an older, intellectually assured man who brings exacting assumptions to love. Hardy uses the triangle to examine the unequal meanings attached to experience and innocence. The coastal landscape supplies moments of beauty and danger, including an encounter with geological time that unsettles human self-importance. The narrative follows how incomplete knowledge of a person's past can become an imagined test of character, and how the wish to be loved may encourage concealments that make genuine understanding more difficult.

• Love and judgment
• Class
• Experience and innocence

Why read it

For an early Hardy novel that tests romantic ideals against class prejudice and unequal expectations of personal history.

English text