The Well-Beloved

Abstract

When Hardy began The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved, for serialization, he did not know that within a few years he would abandon novel-writing; such a thought was never implicit in his theme. He did know that the ‘withering change’ which he had contemplated hypothetically with reference to his first love for Emma in ‘Ditty’ had occurred to him again and again in succeeding years, and had reached the devastating inception of an uncertain phase. He was at the point when he could both question the wisdom of instituting Christian marriage as a mutual pledge or bond for life, and contemplate with self-mockery the frequency with which he had imagined himself falling in love from his early years, either to find ‘utter elusion’ a factor for making ‘a passing love permanent’ or only to be disappointed or disillusioned. ‘At Waking’, written at Weymouth in 1869, records the extinction of the glamour the poet had seen in the ‘prize’ life’s lottery had brought, when realization of the reality, as the ‘dead-white’ light of day emerges, inculcates a truth akin to that projected at the end of The Well-Beloved. Writing not long afterwards in Desperate Remedies on those ‘echoes of himself’ which Stephen Springrove’s impressionable heart had found, Hardy almost certainly had in mind his own experience with men friends (chiefly Horace Moule, one suspects) and young women. As Stephen fails to find ‘the indefinable helpmate’, he concludes that ‘the ideas, or rather emotions’ which possess him are probably too unreal ever to be embodied in the flesh of a woman, and turns therefore to the heroines of poetical imagination, till Cytherea appears and his heart speaks: