The well-beloved - Thomas Hardy

This remarkable novel was first serialised as "The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved" in 1892, between "Tess of the d'Urbervilles" (1891) and "Jude the Obscure" (1895). It was thoroughly reworked several times before appearing as a book in 1897. The definitive version was published in 1912, by which time Hardy had ceased writing novels and turned his attention to poetry. These successive revisions over a period of twenty years are testament to both the author's literary perfectionism and the importance he ascribed to this particular novel. Jocelyn Pierston returns to his childhood Wessex as a young sculptor of twenty, in search of an ideal he describes his Well-Beloved; she takes form in successive women, who never manage to remain The Ideal for long. Pierston is astonished to discover the Well-Beloved in his childhood neighbour Avice, a beautiful, simple woman fashioned from local stock. He proposes: she accepts, but at the last minute slips away. Twenty years later, aged forty and still searching for the Well-Beloved, Pierston falls in love with Avice's daughter... and another twenty years later her granddaughter.;The sculptor is bewildered by this never ending spiral; it seems that time has stopped, and history is doomed to repeat itself. Proust was fascinated by this tale - and the pursuit of Avice I, II and III foreshadows the link between Odette and Gilberte in "A la recherche du temps perdu", with the mother-daughter bond marking the passage of time in both works. Proust read Hardy's tale when "Recherche" was no more than a sketch, writing in a 1910 letter "such a beautiful work, which unfortunately resembles - yet a thousand times better - what I myself am doing". This is an exquisite short story exploring the theme of the well-beloved from the female point of view...