Two on a Tower

Description

The book contains not one, but two of Hardy’s most popular novels: Two on a Tower and A Pair of Blue Eyes, two romantic novels written in the unique style that characterizes Hardy’s writings.

Two on a Tower is the story of a star-crossed love, that is, the story of a love relationship that has come to be under the wrong constellation and was not supposed to be at all. One of the main characters is Lady Constantine, an unhappily married aristocratic woman who falls in love with an astronomer ten years younger than she is, Swithin St. Cleeve. Lady Constantine’s husband dies, which would make the reader hopeful that the couple would be free to be together now, but happy ending is not that simple to achieve: the two lovers are still forced apart and not only by class division.

The other novel in the book is about a love triangle made up by a young woman and her two suitors, two gentlemen of different backgrounds. One of them is inferior to the young woman from a social and class perspective, but is highly ambitious and adores the young lady, while the other suitor is an older man who is financially established and is able to offer the young woman a stable and respectable life. The story has a tragic ending – the young woman is unable to cope with the conflict between her feelings and the social expectations she is forced to live up to and the novel ends with a sad twist.

Both novels in the book focus on the conflict between feelings and social expectations, between religion and science, bias and true feelings. The language of both novels is obscurely poetic at times, but both stories are written in a masterful, dramatic, and unmistakably Hardian style, providing the reader with excellent insight into the social life at the end of the 19th century.
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