The Well-Beloved

Abstract

Although The Well-Beloved did not appear in volume form until March 1897, it was written in late 1891 and early 1892 and published as a weekly serial in the Illustrated London News from October to December 1892.¹ It was the heavily revised book version that Hardy referred to (in a letter to Sir George Douglas) as a “fanciful, tragicomic, half allegorical tale of a poor Visionary pursuing a Vision”.² Fanciful it certainly is. Of his central character, the sculptor Jocelyn Pierston, Hardy writes in the second chapter:

To his Well-Beloved he had always been faithful; but she had had many embodiments. Each individuality known as Lucy, Jane, Flora, Evangeline, or what-not, had been merely a transient condition of her. He did not recognize this as an excuse or as a defence, but as a fact simply. Essentially she was perhaps of no tangible substance; a spirit, a dream, a frenzy, a conception, an aroma, an epitomized sex, a light of the eye, a parting of the lips. God only knew what she really was; Pierston did not. She was indescribable. (10–11)