The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters
1876
Here is Thomas Hardy without the doom. The author of Tess and Jude the Obsure turns his sharp eye to society instead of fate, delivering a comic portrait of a woman who refuses to be confined by her station. Ethelberta Petherwin, born Berta Chickerel, has climbed from governess to widow of a gentleman, and now schemes higher still - reinventing herself as a society poet in London while her own family secretly serves her household. With four suitors in pursuit and her web of lies growing ever more intricate, she plays the marriage market like a game, balancing money against love, security against passion. Hardy dissects Victorian hypocrisy with gleeful precision: the poetry world, the social ladder, the desperate arithmetic of marriage. Yet Ethelberta remains irresistibly watchable - calculating, yes, but also genuinely clever, a woman using every tool at her disposal in a world that offers women so few. It's a surprising, lighter Hardy, sharp as a blade and twice as entertaining.
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“A half knowledge of another's life mostly does injustice to the life unknown.””
— Thomas Hardy
“She is one of those people who are known, as one may say, by subscription: everybody knows a little, till she is astonishingly well known altogether; but nobody knows her entirely. She””
— Thomas Hardy
“Between himself and her there was that kind of division which is more insurmountable than enmity; for estrangements produced by good judgment will last when those of feeling break down in smiles. Not the lovers who part in passion, but the lovers who part in friendship, are those who most frequently part forever.””
— Thomas Hardy
“New love is brightest, and long love is greatest; but revived love is the tenderest thing known upon earth.””
— Thomas Hardy
“The truth is, that I never care much for reading what one ought to read; I wish I did, but I cannot help it. And,””
— Thomas Hardy
“A woman who attempts a public career must expect to be treated as public property: what would be an intrusion on a domiciled gentlewoman is a tribute to me.””
— Thomas Hardy
“But in recognizing her ignorance of the ratio between words to women and deeds to women in the ethical code of the bachelor of the club, she forgot that human nature in the gross differs little with situation, and that a gift which, if the germs were lacking, no amount of training in clubs and coteries could supply, was mother-wit like her own.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Love begins with a sense of superior discernment.””
— Thomas Hardy
“Marriage is only an accident of situation, situation an accident of history, history of geography.””
— Thomas Hardy
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Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. Lex, lex-books.com/book/the-hand-of-ethelberta-a-comedy-in-chapters-4d97ce57-18ea-4426-b913-5cb6eb6b56d3.Hardy, T. (1876). The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-hand-of-ethelberta-a-comedy-in-chapters-4d97ce57-18ea-4426-b913-5cb6eb6b56d3Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. Lex. https://lex-books.com/book/the-hand-of-ethelberta-a-comedy-in-chapters-4d97ce57-18ea-4426-b913-5cb6eb6b56d3.
