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Book Synopsis
''Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.''Elfride is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began the book during the first days of his courtship of his first wife Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice. Written at a crucial time in Hardy''s life, A Pair of Blue Eyes expresses more directly than any of his novels the events and social forces that made him the writer he was. Elfride''s dilemma mirrors the difficult decision Hardy himself had to make with this novel: to pursue the profession of architecture, where he was established, or literature, where he had yet to make his name? ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made av

A Pair of Blue Eyes

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    A Paperback / softback by Thomas Hardy, Tim Dolin, Alan Manford

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      Publisher: Oxford University Press
      Publication Date: 29/01/2009
      ISBN13: 9780199538492, 978-0199538492
      ISBN10: 0199538492
      Also in:
      Books by Thomas Hardy

      Description

      Book Synopsis
      ''Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.''Elfride is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Cornwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began the book during the first days of his courtship of his first wife Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice. Written at a crucial time in Hardy''s life, A Pair of Blue Eyes expresses more directly than any of his novels the events and social forces that made him the writer he was. Elfride''s dilemma mirrors the difficult decision Hardy himself had to make with this novel: to pursue the profession of architecture, where he was established, or literature, where he had yet to make his name? ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made av

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