Abstract
Featured in title and opening chapter of this third of Hardy’s ‘minor’ trio of novels from the early 1880s, and his ninth novel overall, is the architectural counterpart to Stancy Castle in AL (1881) and Overcombe Mill in TM (1880): a tower in the form of a Classical column on the estate of Viviette, Lady Constantine. A brisk narrative tempo soon emerges from the surprising but pleasant discovery by an initially unidentified lady of an unidentified blond youth, gazing at the sky through a telescope on the roof of her own tower. From the very start, venue and main characters (Lady Constantine and Swithin St Cleeve) are established by direct presentation, unlike, for instance, the tangential openings of RN, TDU and WL.
The column had been erected in the last century, as a substantial memorial of her husband’s greatgrandfather, a respectable officer who had fallen in the American war, and the reason of her lack of interest was partly owing to her relations with this husband, of which more anon. It was little beyond the sheer desire for something to do — the chronic desire of her curiously lonely life — that had brought her here now. She was in a mood to welcome anything that would in some measure disperse an almost killing ennui. She would have welcomed even a misfortune. She had heard that from the summit of the pillar four counties could be seen. Whatever pleasurable effect was to be derived from looking into four counties at the same time she resolved to enjoy today.1
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Notes
Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower: A Romance, edited with Introduction and Notes by Sally Shuttleworth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1999), pp. 4–5
Andrew Radford, Thomas Hardy and the Survivals of Time (Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2003), p. 113
With the exceptions of UGT and WB, TT is also the shortest of Hardy’s fourteen novels. Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London: Bodley Head, 1971), pp. 145–93
Simon Gatrell, ‘Middling Hardy’, Thomas Hardy Annual No. 4 (London: Macmillan, 1986), pp. 70–90
Richard H. Taylor, The Neglected Hardy: Thomas Hardy’s Lesser Novels (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1982)
Richard Little Purdy and Michael Millgate, eds., The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy 1840–1892 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), I, p. 114
See Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
See Ken Ireland, The Sequential Dynamics of Narrative: Energies at the Margins of Fiction (Cranbury NJ and London: Associated University Presses, 2001), pp. 80–7.
Julian Wolfreys, Thomas Hardy (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 118
See Norman Page, Thomas Hardy (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1977), p. 112.
Simon Gatrell, Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1993), p. 57.
John Goode, Thomas Hardy: The Offensive Truth (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), p. 74.
Joseph Warren Beach, The Technique of Thomas Hardy (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962), p. 14.
R B. Pinion, Hardy the Writer: Surveys and Assessments (London: Macmillan, 1990), p. 48.
Edmund Blunden, Thomas Hardy (London: Macmillan, 1958), p. 206.
See Anna Henchman, ‘Hardy’s Stargazers and the Astronomy of Other Minds’, Victorian Studies 51.1 (Autumn 2008), 37–64
Pamela Gossin, Thomas Hardy’s Novel Universe: Astronomy, Cosmology, and Gender in the Post-Darwinian World (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), p. 175.
Lance St John Butler, Thomas Hardy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 26
T. R. Wright, Hardy and his Readers (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), pp. 142–3
Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Literary Career (New York: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 136
Mieke Bal, Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), p. 67
Rosemary Sumner, A Route to Modernism: Hardy, Lawrence, Woolf (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 33
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© 2014 Ken Ireland
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Ireland, K. (2014). The Better Heaven Beneath: Revenges of Time in Two on a Tower. In: Thomas Hardy, Time and Narrative. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367723_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137367723_9
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