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Left penniless after her father's death, Cytherea Graye takes a post as lady's companion to the wealthy, unmarried Miss Aldclyffe, who, it turns out, once…
Left penniless after her father's death, Cytherea Graye takes a post as lady's companion to the wealthy, unmarried Miss Aldclyffe, who, it turns out, once loved Cytherea's father. Separated from Edward Springrove, the young architect she loves, Cytherea is pursued by Miss Aldclyffe's new steward, the handsome and mysterious Aeneas Manston, whose wife is believed to have died in a fire. Pressed by poverty and duty, she agrees to marry him, and only then do the secrets of the past begin to surface.
Context and significance
This was Thomas Hardy's first published novel, issued anonymously in 1871 at his own expense, and it is a complicated sensation novel in the manner of Wilkie Collins, full of coincidences, crimes and detection. It already shows Hardy's eye for the Dorset countryside. Compare Collins's The Woman in White and Hardy's next novel, Under the Greenwood Tree.
About the author
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was the son of a stonemason in a Dorset hamlet and trained as an architect, restoring country churches. His novels, set in the imaginary region of Wessex, began with modest success, and Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) allowed him to write full time.
After the storm of criticism over Jude the Obscure in 1895 he gave up novels for poetry and wrote some of the best English poems of the twentieth century, many of them about his first wife Emma after her death. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart in his home parish.