A Laodicean: A Story of Today (Everyman Library) in Works of Thomas Hardy

Sep 23, 2021 grllopez ~ with freedom and books rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: classics, fiction

My immediate thoughts: why was this was so intricately prolonged? and then, I similarly enjoyed it because it was Hardy -- complicated relationships: convoluted and extensive, mixed up and tricky; and award-winning story telling. I gave him four stars, though A Laodicean will probably be my least favorite of the Hardys I have read. This is a good story for Hardy fans who adore his narratives about relationships and people and don't mind being bogged down in long-winded details about every day li ...more

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May 12, 2018 John Frankham rated it really liked it

Shelves: fiction-pre-1900

A curiously uneven novel, possibly because it was largely dictated by Hardy when very ill, but having to meet monthly magazine deadlines. On solid ground when based in England but there is almost an over-tortuous middle section when characters thunder through Europe, randomly meeting, or failing to meet, each other. Illegitimacy, blackmail, personaton, theft, revealing tattoos, etc, abound. Enjoyable, partly profound and partly silly!

A review - not mine!

'If you decide to read A Laodicean, you’re A curiously uneven novel, possibly because it was largely dictated by Hardy when very ill, but having to meet monthly magazine deadlines. On solid ground when based in England but there is almost an over-tortuous middle section when characters thunder through Europe, randomly meeting, or failing to meet, each other. Illegitimacy, blackmail, personaton, theft, revealing tattoos, etc, abound. Enjoyable, partly profound and partly silly!

A review - not mine!

'If you decide to read A Laodicean, you’re in for an uneven experience – expect irritating characters, an unsatisfying conclusion, and a tedious lovers’ correspondence which you could say, with some justification, finds a modern equivalent in the email drama of E.L. James’s Fifty Shades of Grey (2011). But you’ll find here too an unusual premise, a heroine who defies stereotypes, some breathtaking prose, a rich display Hardy’s architectural knowledge, and insights into the very modern world of the 1880s.

'The subtitle of Thomas Hardy’s lesser-known 1881 novel, A Laodicean, is ‘A Story of To-day’. This nods to one of the main points of difference between this novel and much of Hardy’s canon – nostalgic, and so often a swansong for a dying rural way of life.

A Laodicean is a novel whose plot relies on modern technology – on an exchange between lovers carried out via telegraph (and as fraught with misunderstandings as many text conversations today), on an altered photograph (possible even in the art’s early years, pre-Photoshop), and on the ability for its characters to race around Europe, almost colliding with each other in a series of missed connections.

The heroine at its centre, however, Paula Power, is, like Hardy, not so sure whether her loyalties lie with the past or the future. The daughter of a self-made railway magnate, she nevertheless lives in the decayed splendour of Castle de Stancy, a mediaeval pile fallen into dilapidation, and finds herself increasingly attracted to the hereditary grandeur it represents.

What is Paula? Low church or high, practical or romantic, a representative of a new ruling class or a new-moneyed misfit lacking the necessary refinement for her role as mistress here? These questions are at the heart of Hardy’s story, and are played out most obviously in Paula’s choice of husband.

There is young George Somerset, an architect with youth and ambition to recommend him, but then again there is handsome army captain William de Stancy, older, morally questionable, and surrounded by the reflected glory of his family’s antiquated past.

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Mar 14, 2025 Alessia Carmicino rated it really liked it

Un figlio sconosciuto di Tess dei D'Umberville, dove la vecchia nobiltà rurale realizza una volta e per sempre che il suo tempo è finito e i "nuovi ricchi" dichiarano senza mezzi termini di sentirsi imperfetti e deficitari per la loro mancanza di sangue blu; con il crollo della casata e delle sue stesse mura, a sentenziare che a dispetto di ogni nostalgia l'età vittoriana è finita e per sempre, la pietra tombale posta con un ultimo romanzo scritto in punto di morte e sotto dettatura.
Si sente la ...more

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Jan 26, 2022 David rated it liked it · review of another edition

More melodramatic than Hardy's usual works. More in line with The Hand of Ethelberta than Return of the Native. Frustrating in parts. But in the end, it is still Hardy, and that cannot be bad. ...more

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