Thomas Hardy’s “The Hand of Ethelberta” (1876)

A few days ago, I finished another Thomas Hardy novel: "The Hand of Ethelberta" (1876). While George Gissing considered it "surely old Hardy's poorest book", I thought it worked pretty well. While Hardy's two previous novels, "A Pair of Blue Eyes" (1873) and "Far From the Madding Crowd" (1874), had central female characters with three men wanting to marry them, the titular Ethelberta has four men after her in the course of the book (plus, she's already a widow). For me, its main flaw is the ending, which skips a number of years that could have offered a very interesting story of Ethelberta taking control of her spendthrift second husband's life. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 11 August 2024)