Desperate Remedies
By Thomas Hardy
His introductions had led him into contact with Cytherea and her parents two or three times on the first week of his arrival in London, and accident and a lover’s contrivance brought them together as frequently the week following. The parents liked young Graye, and having few friends (for their equals in blood were their superiors in position), he was received on very generous terms.
His passion for Cytherea grew strong but ineffably exalted: without positively encouraging him, she tacitly assented to his schemes for being near her. Her father and mother seemed to have lost all confidence in the nobility of birth without money to give effect to its presence. They looked upon the budding consequence of the young people’s reciprocal glances with placidity, if not actual favour. Graye’s whole impassioned dream terminated in a sad and unaccountable episode. After three weeks of sweet experience, he had arrived at the last stage—a kind of moral Gaza— before plunging into an emotional desert.
The second week in January had come around, and the young architect needed to leave town. Throughout his acquaintanceship with the lady of his heart, there had been this marked peculiarity in her love: she had delighted in his presence as a sweetheart should do, yet from first to last, she had repressed all recognition of the true nature of the thread which drew them together, blinding herself to its meaning and only natural tendency, and appearing to dread his announcement of them. The present seemed enough for her without cumulative hope: usually, even if love is an end, it must be regarded as a beginning to be enjoyed.
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Thomas Hardy
Thomas Hardy OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet.
Biography.
A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, Hardy was influenced by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth, both in his novels and in his poetry. He was highly critical of Victorian society, especially the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898.
Initially, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy’s poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin lauded his poems.
Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy’s Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in south-west and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC’s survey The Big Read.
Thomas Hardy
