Ah, my well-beloved Hardy! According to the introduction, this was the last novel he ever wrote, before moving on to just poetry, fed up with the scandal caused by Jude the Obscure. It shows, this novel is not as narrative, as intricately plotted as others of his: it really just wants to present a thesis, a preconceived idea: what if a man falls in love over his life with three different women from the same family? However, he falls in love with them while they are young and pretty, even if he is getting older! Well, to sum up, it is a bit like what we call in Spanish "una novela de tesis", a bit like reading Unamuno. Cerebral, conceptual.
In a way, it presents the life of a man as his failure in love, his failure to fulfill his love with any of the women with whom he falls in love. It reminded me of Any Human Heart by William Boyd, the adaptation of which we have just seen on T.V., where we also have an artist telling us the story of his life through the women he has loved.
The sense of place again is beautiful. It is set in Portland in Dorset, and there is an amazing initial scene on Chesil Beach that should make Ian McEwan jealous. How can a stranger manage to get so physically close to a woman in the nineteenth century? How can it be that -of course- at some point she will have to take off her clothes so a man can fall in love with her while putting them to dry?
Whenever the little action moved to fashionable London I lost interested in the story and it ceased to ring true or special. I think this was partly intentional. This artist is pulled to Portland, to his turf, all the time, a place where, as a friend points out, "a man might love a scarecrow or a turnip-lantern".
I was also very interested to learn about the rural custom of "pre-marital sexual intercourse to determine the fertility of a couple, marriage following on from the woman's pregnancy", as explained in the notes. Have I read about this in Hardy's other books?