A pair of blue eyes
Thomas Hardy
(, June 20, 2018)
A Pair of Blue Eyes is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1873, first serialised between September 1872 and July 1873. It was Hardy's third novel, but the first to bear his name on publication.The book describes the love triangle of a young woman, Elfride Swancourt, and her two suitors from very different backgrounds. Stephen Smith is a socially inferior but ambitious young man who adores her and with whom she shares a country background. Henry Knight is the respectable, established, older man who represents London society. Although the two are friends, Knight is not aware of Smith's previous liaison with Elfride.Elfride finds herself caught in a battle between her heart, her mind and the expectations of those around her – her parents and society. When Elfride's father finds that his guest and candidate for his daughter's hand, architect's assistant Stephen Smith, is the son of a mason, he immediately orders him to leave. Knight, who is a relative of Elfride's stepmother, is later on the point of seeking to marry Elfride, but ultimately rejects her when he learns she had been previously courted.Elfride, out of desperation, marries a third man, Lord Luxellian. The conclusion finds both suitors travelling together to Elfride, both intent on claiming her hand, and neither knowing either that she is already married or that they are accompanying her corpse and coffin as they travel."Recently, studies of Virginia Woolf have focused on feminist and lesbian themes in her work, such as in the 1997 collection of critical essays, Virginia Woolf: Lesbian Readings, edited by Eileen Barrett and Patricia Cramer."[313] In 1928, Virginia Woolf took a grassroots approach to informing and inspiring feminism. She addressed undergraduate women at the ODTAA Society at Girton College, Cambridge and the Arts Society at Newnham College with two papers that eventually became A Room of One's Own (1929).[201] Woolf's best-known nonfiction works, A Room of One's Own (1929)[201] and Three Guineas (1938),[348] examine the difficulties that female writers and intellectuals faced because men held disproportionate legal and economic power, as well as the future of women in education and society, as the societal effects of industrialization and birth control had not yet fully been realized.[citation needed] In The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir counts, of all women who ever lived, only three female writers—Emily Brontë, Woolf and "sometimes" Katherine Mansfield— have explored "the given."[378]Abhorred slave,Which any print of goodness wilt not take,Being capable of all ill! I pitied thee,Took pains to make thee speak, taught thee each hourOne thing or other: when thou didst not, savage,Know thine own meaning, but wouldst gabble likeA thing most brutish, I endow'd thy purposesWith words that made them known. But thy vile race,Though thou didst learn, had that in't whichgood naturesCould not abide to be with; therefore wast thouDeservedly confined into this rock,Who hadst deserved more than a prison.[4]O wonder!How many goodly creatures are there here!How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,Women's suffrage (colloquial: female suffrage, woman suffrage or women's right to vote) is the right of women to vote in elections; a person who advocates the extension of suffrage, particularly to women, is called a suffragist.[1] Limited voting rights were gained by women in Finland, Iceland, Sweden and some Australian colonies and western U.S. states in the late 19th century.[2]National and international organizations formed to coordinate efforts to gain voting rights, especially the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (founded in 1904, Berlin, Germany), and also worked for equal civil rights for women.[3]The novel is the first to be set in Hardy's fictional region of Wessex in rural south west England. It deals in themes of love, honour and betrayal, against a backdrop of the seemingly idyllic.