The Clansman

A Pair of Blue Eyes was the third of Hardy’s novels to be published and the first to be serialised, running in Tinsleys’ Magazine from the September of 1872 until the July of the following year. It appeared in three-volume form in May 1873, a year after the publication of Under the Greenwood Tree.

It is essentially a love-story. Elfride Swancourt, the blue-eyed heroine, lives with her widowed father, a clergyman, in a remote Cornish village. She is wooed successively by Stephen Smith, a young architect of humble birth, and Henry Knight, a successful man of letters, once a mentor to Stephen. In appearance, character and situation Elfride obviously has much in common with the young Emma Gifford, who was to become Hardy’s wife. The circumstances in which she and Smith meet recapitulate pretty exactly Emma’s first encounter with her future husband, when he came to Cornwall in March, 1870, on a church restoration project. In his Life, however, Hardy plays down the correspondences between himself and Smith, claiming that at the relevant time he had been closer in age and character to Knight.