Over the last 2-3 weeks, I've read Thomas Hardy's short novel 'The Well-Beloved', mainly a few pages here and there late at night or while travelling on public transport during the day.
Found 'The Well-Beloved' less obscure than some reviewers say. The story centres around the artist, Jocelyn Pierston (above) who flits between his working world of London and 'homeland' of the Isle of Portland peninsula near Weymouth.
Pierston is a talented artist and has a highly successful professional life in London, but his 'curse' is that he has an ideal image of womanhood, probably borne from his artwork, that flits from one woman to another which stops him from ever getting to know a woman really until near the end of the novel.
Pierston is first shown at the age of 20 deserting his childhood sweetheart, Avice Caro, through eloping to London with the more upmarket Marcia Bencomb, who then deserts him to go travelling round the world with her father.
Throughout 'The Well-Beloved', the Isle of Portland is presented as a magical place full of castles and strong tides as well as limestone cottages and quarries.
Through his 3rd-person narrative voice, Hardy makes several references to the fact that the Isle of Portland was previously known as the 'Isle of Slingers' where the native 'stone-slingers' were routed by the Roman invaders in antiquity.
He also makes repeated reference to the fact that in the mid-18th century, the 'Isle of Slingers' was still true to its own customs and traditions which differed from those of the 'mainland', one of these being to test sexual chemistry out before marriage. Unfortunately for Pierston, he is too lost in abstraction, the 'curse' of his 'well-beloved' image of womanhood, to get to know a woman properly at a sexual level.
Pierston is shown at the age of 40 returning to the 'Isle of Slingers' to watch from a distance his childhood sweetheart, the first Avice Caro, being buried in a church graveyard next to the sea. When the funeral procession has left and the sun has gone down, Pierston mourns on a graveyard wall, and believes that he's dreaming when the spitting image of Avice Caro (who turns out to be her daughter) visits her mother's fresh grave in the darkness.
From here, Pierston gets to know the '2nd Avice' (Ann Caro) who is horrified to learn that it was Pierston who deserted her mother and rejects his offer of marriage as she's already married to Isaac Pierston. Here, Hardy emphasises the tight family interconnections of the mid-19th century Isle of Portland where only six surnames are said to have existed on the peninsula.
Anyway, the '2nd Avice' has a daughter with Isaac Pierston, and Jocelyn takes care of his '2nd Avice' by setting Isaac up in business, and retreats again to his successful professional life in London.
Nice shot below of what's believed to be the cottage that inspired Hardy's descriptions of the Caro family cottage in 'The Well-Beloved':
Finally, some time after her husband's death, the '2nd Avice' calls for Jocelyn to visit her on the Isle of Portland, where, as a 60-year-old, he falls for the 20-year-old '3rd Avice' who deserts him for the stepson of Marcia Bencomb (such an unlikely twist of fate being a common feature of Hardy, of course).
When the '3rd Avice' has eloped with Mr. Leverre, the '2nd Avice' dies with the tragic inference being that as a 40-year-old, she may well have been ready to marry Jocelyn, but, instead, she had nobly stood aside to let him pursue her daughter.
Finally, Marcia Bencomb returns to the scene to strike up a real friendship with and later marry Jocelyn who drops his artist work to focus on more practical concerns on the Isle of Portland. Thus, in his early 60s, Jocelyn seems to have eventually found the world of meaningful particular reality after being lost in the abstraction of idealising womanhood for most of his life.
