Hardy Thomas - Pair of Blue Eyes

OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

A PAIR OF BLUE EYES

THOMAS HARDY was born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, on 2 June 1840; his father was a builder in a small way of business, and he was educated locally and in Dorchester before being articled to an architect. After sixteen years in that profession and the publication of his earliest novel Desperate Remedies (1871), he determined to make his career in literature; not, however, before his work as an architect had led to his meeting at St Juliot in Cornwall, Emma Gifford, who became his first wife in 1874.

In the 1860s Hardy had written a substantial amount of unpublished verse, but during the next twenty years almost all his creative effort went into novels and short stories. Jude the Obscure, the last written of his novels, came out in 1895, closing a sequence of fiction that includes Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), Two on a Tower (1882), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and Tess of the dUrbervilles (1891).

Hardy maintained in later life that only in poetry could he truly express his ideas; and the more than nine hundred poems in his collected verse (almost all published after 1898) possess great individuality and power.

In 1910 Hardy was awarded the Order of Merit; in 1912 Emma died and two years later he married Florence Dugdale. Thomas Hardy died in January 1928; the work he left behindthe novels, the poetry, and the epic drama The Dynastsforms one of the supreme achievements in English imaginative literature.

ALAN MANFORD was formerly Head of English at a Birmingham comprehensive school. For his Ph.D. he prepared a critical edition of A Pair of Blue Eyes and he has published articles and reviews concerning Thomas Hardy, as well as his own writing.

TIM DOLIN is a Research Fellow at Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia. He is the author of Mistress of the House: Women of Property in the Victorian Novel (1997), and George Eliot (2005), and co-editor (with Peter Widdowson) of Thomas Hardy and Contemporary Literary Studies (2004). He has introduced Charlotte Bronts Villette for Oxford Worlds Classics.

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OXFORD WORLDS CLASSICS

THOMAS HARDY

Edited with Notes by
ALAN MANFORD

With a new Introduction by
TIM DOLIN

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP

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Text, Note on the Text, Explanatory Notes Alan Manford 1985
Chronology Patricia Ingham 2002
Introduction, Select Bibliography Tim Dolin 2005

The moral rights of the author have been asserted
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First published as a Worlds Classics paperback 1985
Reissued as an Oxford Worlds Classics paperback 1998
New edition 2005

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ISBN 0192840738 9780192840738

THE first concern in the Oxford Worlds Classics editions of Hardys works has been with the texts. Individual editors have compared every version of the novel or stories that Hardy might have revised, and have noted variant readings in words, punctuation and styling in each of these substantive texts; they have thus been able to exclude much that their experience suggests that Hardy did not intend. In some cases this is the first time that the novel has appeared in a critical edition purged of errors and oversights; where possible Hardys manuscript punctuation is used, rather than what his compositors thought he should have written.

Some account of the editors discoveries will be found in the Note on the Text in each volume, while the most interesting revisions their work has revealed are included as an element of the Explanatory Notes. In some cases a Clarendon Press edition of the novel provides a wealth of further material for the reader interested in the way Hardys writing developed from manuscript to final collected edition.

I should like to thank Shirley Tinkler for her help in drawing the maps that accompany each volume.

SIMQN GATRELL

Readers who do not wish to learn details of the plot will prefer to treat the Introduction as an Epilogue