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.
