Two on a Tower
A wealthy older lady and a beautiful young astronomer, absorbed in the stars from his lonely tower, fall into a secret and socially forbidden love. Hardy sets their fragile romance against the vast indifference of the cosmos, contrasting the immensity of the heavens with the smallness and intensity of human passion. Tender, ironic, and quietly radical about class and desire, the novel is one of his most unusual and affecting. Beneath its love story runs Hardy’s characteristic sense of the cruelty of chance and convention, making it a moving minor masterpiece of Victorian fiction.
About the Author
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was an English novelist and poet whose fiction, set in a half-imagined Wessex, probed fate, class, and the constraints of Victorian society. His major novels are cornerstones of English literature.
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