Welcome to the Ignorant Historian! If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I recently read Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes. It a story about a young girl, Elfride, who falls in love with an equally young man in her youth and her father refused to allow them to be married because he is the son of commoners. She and the man, Stephen, decide to meet between her home and London where he lives to be married, which requires her to travel by horseback to St. Launce’s. As she starts out on her mare, she has second thoughts, which Hardy details beautifully:
“…and Elfride felt it would be absurd to turn her little mare’s head the other way [back home]. ‘Still,’ she thought, ‘if I had a mamma at home I would go back!’
And making one of those stealthy movements by which women let their hearts juggle with their brains, she did put the horse’s head about, as if unconsciously, and went at a hand-gallop towards home for more than a mile. By this time, from the inveterate habit of valuing what we have renounced directly the alternative is chosen, the thought of her forsaken Stephen recalled her, and she turned about, and cantered to St. Launce’s again.
This miserable strife of thought now began to rage in all its wildness. Overwrought and trembling, she dropped the rein upon Pansy’s shoulders, and vowed she would be led whither the horse should take her….
She was impatient. It seemed as if Pansy would never stop drinking; and the repose of the pool, and the idle motions of the insects and flies upon it, the placid waving of the flags, the leaf-skeletons, like Genoese filigree, placidly sleeping at the bottom, by their contrast with her own turmoil made her impatience greater.
Pansy did turn at last, and went up the slope again to the high-road. The pony came upon it, and stood crosswise, looking up and down. Elfride’s heart throbbed erratically, and she thought, ‘Horses, if left to themselves, make for where they are best fed. Pansy will go home.’
Pansy turned and walked on toward St. Launce’s.
Pansy at home, during summer, had a little but grass to live on. After a run to St. Launce’s she always had a feed of corn to support her on the return journey. Therefore, being now more than half way, she preferred St. Launce’s.
But Elfride did not remember this now. All she cared to recognize was a dreamy fancy that to-day’s rash action was not her own. She was disabled by her moods, and it seemed indispensable to adhere to the programme. So strangely involved are motives that, more than by her promise to Stephen, more even than by her love, she was forced on by a sense of the necessity of keeping faith with herself, as promised in the inane vow of ten minutes ago.”
p. 109-110
What makes this book so remarkable to me is the amount that I relate to the main character, Elfride. She is moved by her emotions, prone to rash decisions, and very unwise at times, yet I’ve never identified with any other character as much as I have with her. There are many characters that I’ve wanted to be: such as Mary Anne (The Babysitter’s Club), Elizabeth (Pride and Prejudice), and Jo (Little Women), but I didn’t actually see myself in these characters. Yet this immature, emotionally Elfride (an ugly name, too!) I relate to!
Oh, and just in case you care, Elfride gets all the way to London and decides to back out of the elopement, which creates the possibility of scandal later when she wants to marry another man, Knight.