The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy

there are others that are more appealing, to me, (am i allowed to say that?), but this one is such a perfect cause-and-effect, every-action-has-a-reaction kind of book, that it should really be his most popular and successful, instead of tess, which by comparison, is pure melodrama. This is hardy's most perfectly-constructed novel. This became the archetypal - and literal - cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. She felt none of those ups and downs of spirit which beset so many people without cause never-to paraphrase a recent poet-never a gloom in Elizabeth-Jane's soul but she well knew how it came there and her present cheerfulness was fairly proportionate to her solid guarantees for the same.Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. Like all people who have known rough times, light-heartedness seemed to her too irrational and inconsequent to be indulged in except as a reckless dram now and then for she had been too early habituated to anxious reasoning to drop the habit suddenly. Perhaps, too, her grey, thoughtful eyes revealed an arch gaiety sometimes but this was infrequent the sort of wisdom which looked from their pupils did not readily keep company with these lighter moods.

Knowledge-the result of great natural insight-she did not lack learning, accomplishment-those, alas, she had not but as the winter and spring passed by her thin face and figure filled out in rounder and softer curves the lines and contractions upon her young brow went away the muddiness of skin which she had looked upon as her lot by nature departed with a change to abundance of good things, and a bloom came upon her cheek. “With peace of mind came development, and with development beauty.

The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy