A few weeks ago, in my “Cornucopia of Recommendations” post,
I said you couldn’t go wrong with a Thomas Hardy novel. Much as it pains me to admit it, I have
to take back the remark. I recently
finished reading Hardy’s lesser-known novel Two on a Tower, and while there
were some features of it that were classic Hardy, it certainly didn’t live up
to the usual Hardy experience.
The premise has promise: a woman of feeling and religious
devotion falls in love with a younger man of science whose ambition is to be a
great astronomer. The woman is Lady
Constantine, a recently widowed 28 year-old; the would-be astronomer, a local
farm boy named Swithin St. Cleeve, whose father’s social standing was brought
down by his marriage to Swithin’s lower-class mother. Swithin is thus genteel enough that when Lady
Constantine first discovers him making stellar observations from a tower on her
property, she is moved to aid him in his ambitions as she can. At the time that she strikes up her
acquaintance, she doesn’t yet know her husband is dead, simply that he has been
in Africa for some years. By the time she learns he is dead, Lady
Constantine has fallen in love with Swithin, and Swithin with her.
But there are complications.
