‘The end of the happy endings’: The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)

Abstract

The Hand of Ethelberta is an ingenious comedy of manners, and it is more than that, but it has been harshly received by critics unwilling to accept that a novelist’s works may, like their creator, be ‘so various in their pith and plan’ (‘So Various’). From its very first appearance in the Cornhill in 1875–61 it was a disappointment to both readers and critics, because in Ethelberta Hardy abruptly rejected the mode of his previous novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, which had been received with high praise. Despite the deliberacy of Hardy’s striking off on to new ground, it has subsequently tended to be regarded as an unhappy aberration between that novel and The Return of the Native. On its own terms it is ‘A Comedy in Chapters’ (as described in the subtitle). Its pursuit of some of Hardy’s deep concerns in an unusual mode is often fascinating and it bears throughout the idiosyncratic stamp of its author. Edmund Gosse saw this clearly in 1890 when he wrote that ‘the worst chapter in The Hand of Ethelberta is recognizable, in a moment, as written by the author of the best chapter in The Return of the Native’²