Abstract
Much has been written about the famous scene in Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872–3) in which Knight slips over the edge of a cliff and, while dangling over a deep chasm, reviews several thousand years of world history before being rescued by a rope of lady’s underwear. Carl J. Weber says the scene was adapted by Hardy from an incident that occurred during a picnic he went on in August 1870 with his future first wife, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who lost an earring during the day in a rocky crevice and asked Hardy, despite the heavy rain, to look for it. According to Weber, Hardy sketched two pictures of the scene and afterwards wrote a poem, “Where the Picnic Was,” recalling the day’s events. The fictionalized version in A Pair of Blue Eyes is “the first indication in the novels of Hardy’s ability to sustain interest in a tense situation by the sheer power of vivid description,” Weber adds. Michael Millgate refers to Hardy’s account of the cliffs along the coasts of Britain, of which this scene forms a part, as irrelevant picture-painting typical of a novel which is little more than “a kind of ragbag of information, ideas, descriptive vignettes, personal experiences, fragments of the author’s brief literary past.” J. O. Bailey says the scene is characteristic of a writer who enjoyed injecting into his novels spectacular events involving man and nature.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Carl J. Weber, Hardy of Wessex (New York, 1940; 1964), pp. 83 and 87;
Michael Millgate, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist (London, 1971), p. 63;
J. O. Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1970), p. 281;
Norman Page, Thomas Hardy (London, 1977), p. 97;
Jean Brooks, Thomas Hardy: The Poetic Structure (Ithaca, N.Y., 1971), p. 150.
Robert Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy (London, 1975), p. 187.
See Gittings, Young Thomas Hardy, pp. 169 and 244n.; Weber, Hardy of Wessex, p. 86; and Denys Kay-Robinson, Hardy’s Wessex Reappraised (Newton Abbot, Devon, 1972), pp. 249–50.
Thomas Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes (London and New York, 1962), p. vi. Subsequent references are to this (the Macmillan) edition.
Robert Gittings, The Older Hardy (London, 1978), p. 181.
I refer, of course, to F. E. Hardy, The Life of Thomas Hardy 1840–1928 (London, 1962), written, except for the last several chapters, by Hardy himself.
Bailey, The Poetry of Thomas Hardy, p. 281; and F. W. Maitland, The Life and Letters of Leslie Stephen (New York and London, 1906), p. 277.
Quoted from The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, ed. James Gibson (London and New York, 1976), p. 322. The sonnet is poem 264 in this edition.
R. L. Purdy, Thomas Hardy: A Bibliographical Study (London, 1954; 1968), pp. 11–12 and 332; Hardy, Life, p. 90; and
The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy, I: 1840–1892, ed. R. L. Purdy and Michael Millgate (Oxford, 1978), pp. 13–14 and 17.
Fraser’s Magazine, 86 (November 1872), 545–61; repr. in Leslie Stephen, Essays in Freethinking and Plainspeaking (London, 1905), pp. 177–225. The essay, like most of Stephen’s published in Fraser’s, was unsigned, but no one could have been in any doubt as to its authorship; Stephen’s feats of hiking and mountain-climbing were famous, and he was a frequent contributor of “outdoorsy” pieces to the magazines.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 1988 John Halperin
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Halperin, J. (1988). Leslie Stephen, Thomas Hardy, and A Pair of Blue Eyes. In: Jane Austen’s Lovers and Other Studies in Fiction and History from Austen to le Carré. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19332-5_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-19332-5_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-19334-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-19332-5
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature & Performing Arts CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)