A Pair of Blue Eyes

Thomas Hardy drew on his own courtship and his years as a young architect for this early novel, set among the cliffs and churches of coastal Cornwall. Elfride Swancourt, a rector’s spirited daughter, finds herself loved by two very different men: Stephen Smith, a gifted architect held back by humble birth, and Henry Knight, his older friend, a severe essayist who judges her past by a harsher standard than he applies to himself. Class prejudice, wounded pride, and the unfair scrutiny placed on women steer the story toward loss. It also holds a famous scene of a man left dangling from a cliff face, often credited with giving the word cliffhanger to the language. A free PDF and EPUB edition is available here.