Later criticism emphasised that it was the first novel to explore seriously the sources of human tragedy and the concomitant inevitability of social and historical processes. (Weber 59) Alfred Tennyson liked A Pair of Blue Eyes best of all the Wessex novels (McSweeney 132). Coventry Patmore, famous for his narrative poem The Angel in the House, about an ideal, happy marriage, read the novel together with his wife repeatedly for many years. As usual after I had read this book and felt the new charm in it, I wished to read the books of no other author, and to read his books over and over” (269). The novel was admired by the American realist author and critic, William Dean Howells, who wrote: “Thomas Hardy I first knew in A Pair of Blue Eyes.
Contemporary critics generally emphasised Hardy’s uncommon ability to render strong passion within a tragedy of circumstances. The book was also published in one volume in America by Henry Holt in the same year.Īn anonymous critic wrote in the Spectator on 28 June 1873 that the story “is powerful, well-proportioned in its parts, and of varied and deep interest, yet not too harrowing for pleasure.” Another critic also praised the novel in the Saturday Review on 2 August 1873 as “one of the most artistically constructed among recent novels” (Gerber and Davis 21). It was first serialised in Tinsley's Magazine in eleven instalments from September 1872 to July 1873, after which Tinsley published the novel in the three-volume form in 1873. This technique is meant to ensure that the reader will buy a magazine with the next instalment in order to find out how the story resolves the cliffhanger.Īlthough A Pair of Blue Eyes, the first novel to carry Hardy’s name, was regarded by earlier critics as a minor work, it occupies a special place in his output. The purpose of a cliffhanger is to end the plot of a serialised narrative at a point that leaves readers in suspense - leaves them, in other words, as if they found themselves hanging from a cliff awaiting rescue.
#The bluest eye cliff notes serial#
He literary term, 'cliffhanger', derives most likely from Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes.
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