Sininen Silmäpari
1873
On the windswept moors of Wessex, a clergyman's daughter meets the world for the first time. Elfride Swancourt has lived her entire nineteen years in the shadow of her father's parish, sheltered from everything except books and her own vivid imagination. When Stephen Smith arrives, an ambitious young architect's apprentice come to restore the local church, Elfride experiences something wholly new: the dizzying, dangerous sensation of falling in love. But her father, a proud man with rigid expectations, will not hear of a match with a man of lesser standing. Into this tender chaos steps Henry Knight, a geologist of intellect and authority, who also捕获了Elfride's heart. Now she must choose between the passionate urgency of first love and the more respectable terrain that society demands, though the choice itself may cost her everything. Hardy, writing with striking autobiographical intensity, gives us a heroine whose blue eyes see everything and understand nothing, and a novel about the cruelty of wanting what you cannot have.
Editions
X-Ray
“There are disappointments which wring us, and there are those which inflict a wound whose mark we bear to our graves. Such are so keen that no future gratification of the same desire can ever obliterate them: they become registered as a permanent loss of happiness.””
— Thomas Hardy
“You ride well, but you don't kiss nicely at all.””
— Thomas Hardy
“When women are secret they are secret indeed; and more often then not they only begin to be secret with the advent of a second lover.””
— Thomas Hardy
“So many people make a name nowadays, that it is more distinguished to remain in obscurity.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Every woman who makes a permanent impression on a man is afterwards recalled to his mind's eye as she appeared in one particular scene, which seems ordained to be her special medium of manifestation throughout all the pages of his memory.””
— Thomas Hardy
“People who have always gone right don't know half as much about the nature and ways of going right as those do who have gone wrong.””
— Thomas Hardy
“If I really seem vain, it is that I am only vain in my ways”
— Thomas Hardy
“And so, though Smith was not at all the man Knight would have deliberately chosen as a friend”
— Thomas Hardy
“How would you draw the line between women with something and women with nothing in them?””
— Thomas Hardy
