Two on a Tower

When love demands a heavy price

Lady Viviette Constantine is consumed by boredom and loneliness. Under solemn oath to lead a solitary life during her husband's indefinite absence, each day is a dreary burden. Desire for something to do takes Viviette to Rings-Hill Speer, a lonely tower on her estate, where she finds Swithin St Cleeve, a young astronomer. Swithin's passion for science and his classical beauty enchant Viviette. Though ten years his senior and socially above him, she becomes infatuated. Swithin awakes to 'a better heaven' beneath the stellar universe which has so absorbed him.

While the serenity of the constellations remains undisturbed, events offer the lovers the chance of happiness. But outside the tower the entanglements of convention are inescapable.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) immortalized the site of his birth—Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester—in his writing. Delicate as a child, he was taught at home by his mother before he attended grammar school. At sixteen, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect, and for many years, architecture was his profession; in his spare time, he pursued his first and last literary love, poetry. Finally convinced that he could earn his living as an author, he retired from architecture, married, and devoted himself to writing. An extremely productive novelist, Hardy published an important book every year or two. In 1896, disturbed by the public outcry over the unconventional subjects of his two greatest novels—Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure—he announced that he was giving up fiction and afterward produced only poetry. In later years, he received many honors. He was buried in Poet’s Corner, in Westminster Abbey. It was as a poet that he wished to be remembered, but today critics regard his novels as his most memorable contribution to English literature for their psychological insight, decisive delineation of character, and profound presentation of tragedy.

Patricia Ingham is a Senior Research Fellow and Reader at St Anne's College, Oxford. She has written on the Victorian novel and on Hardy in particular. she is the General Editor of all of Hardy's fiction in the Penguin Classics and has edited Gaskell's North and South for the series.