Two On A Tower

Two On A Tower pairs a seventeen-year-old stargazer with a lonely aristocrat abandoned by her husband. Swithin St. Cleeve spends his nights on an ancient tower, mapping the heavens with a borrowed telescope, when Lady Constantine begins joining him. She is eight years his senior, unhappily married, and undone by the young man's absolute reverence for the cosmos. Their nightly observations become an intimacy that no amount of starshine can legitimize in Victorian England. Hardy builds their romance against the cold machinery of the universe itself, the telescope pointed at infinite space while two human hearts collide with age, class, and convention. Swithin's ambitions toward scientific renown collapse; his passion for Viviette does not. What follows is a series of choices that Hardy delivers with the devastating clarity of a man who believed passion and tragedy to be inseparable. It is Hardy's tragedy of aspiration: reaching toward the stars while anchored to earthbound failure.