Product Description

Jocelyn seeks female prefection, ultimately he and Marcia are alike in that, like the rock of Portland, both have been sculpted by and subjected to the chisellings of time.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #69716 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 368 pages

Synopsis
This book has an introduction and notes by Jane Thomas, of the University of Hull. "The Well-Beloved" completes the cycle of Hardy's great novels, reiterating his favourite themes of man's eternal quest for perfection in both love and art, and the suffering that ensues. Jocelyn Pierston, celebrated sculptor, tries to create an image of his ideal woman - his imaginary "Well-Beloved" - in stone, just as he tries to find her in the flesh. Powerful symbolism marks this romantic fantasy that Hardy has grounded firmly in reality with a characteristically authentic rendering of location, the Isle of Slingers, or Portland as we know it. Overt exploration of the relationship between erotic fascination and creativity makes this novel a nineteenth-century landmark in the persistent debate about art, aesthetics and gender.

Customer Reviews

Worth pursuing
After a holiday around Weymouth it only seemed apt for me to read a novel by the most famous author from the region. The Well Beloved is mostly set on the "isle" of Portland. It tells the story of the native-born, famous sculptor Jocelyn Pierston who falls in love with young ladies from three generations of the same Portland family.

The idea of the "curse" of the well-beloved travelling from mother to daughter after some wanderings in-between is an interesting one, albeit quite disturbing in a modern context though Hardy treats it with subtlety and sensitivity.

As expected, his prose is excellent though I found the novel to sag, in a literary and emotional sense, in the second third of the book when the 40 year old Piertson falls for the 20 year-old Avice the second. It does however pick up with the more benevolent intentions of the 59-year-old protagonist in the final part of the triptych.

As well as the superior, more cohesive whole novel first published in 1897, the New Wessex Edition also interestingly includes significantly different passages taken from the original 1892 magazine version of the story. Like most classic old novels, The Well Beloved is quite difficult going at times for the modern reader but ultimately well worth pursuing. Especially if you've just returned from a break near the Isle of Slingers...

An overlooked Gem
I came to the read the Well Beloved after I had finished the obvious Hardy novels and read quite a lot of his short stories. So i was expecting the law of dominshing returns to apply. In the event I was proved happily wrong.

The lead character is quite obviously a character which hardy thought resembled himself and his own problems with his relationships with the women in his life. Jocelyn repeatedly falls head over heels in love wih a women and then places her on a pedestal as the perfection of womanhood. When the real woman fails to live up to this ideal, he looses all interest. Yet rather then seeing this fickleness as what it is, Joceyln rationalises that he is persuing a single perfect muse the "well-beloved" that temporarily inhabits a particular earthly female. This ideal leads to him being unable to commit to any one woman.

This theme of the destructive power of mens objectification of women as pure and innocent, is also central to "Tess" and "Jude". Angel Clare idealises Tess to the extent that he hypocriticaly and selfishly leaves her when he finds out she is not a virgin. Jude idealises Arrabella then later Sue even though both women in their own way are very different to his ideal. Arrabella he thinks is innocent and a child of nature (when she is most defiantly not), Sue he sees as an emancipated free spirited women (when she actually is in many conventional and trapped). However in the well-beloved Hardy treats this theme entirely differently. It is not treated as tradgedy, in fact the former 'Well-Beloved's' get on with their lives as Jocelyn looks increasingly desperate and ridiculous. It also differs from the other late novels by being highly structured and by shunning his usual realism for a more lyrical and stylised mode. This way it bares more of a simularity with some of his short stories then his later novels. The prose is also more playfull and purple then his usual style.
This novel may not rank up there with his five great wessx tradgedies but in its own quite different way it is classic Hardy in its own right.