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In this captivating early novel, Thomas Hardy crafts a piercing story about the search for happiness in a world ruled by rigid social convention.
Nineteen-year-old Elfride longs for more than a quiet life in rural Cornwall, and she’s torn between the two men who may offer her a way out. Young Stephen Smith is a handsome and ambitious architect, while the older Henry Knight is a wealthy London intellectual.
But between dogmatic ideals surrounding Elfride’s “purity” and her father’s insistence that she marry above her class, the societal doctrines of the time seem stacked against Elfride and both of her suitors. Through the page-turning drama that unfolds (including the literal origin of the term cliffhanger), Hardy skewers the hypocrisies of the Victorian era in ways that feel startlingly relevant today.
