The Hand of Ethelberta Book

I have a fatal weakness for the minor or forgotten work that may turn out to be the proverbial diamond in the dustcart (actually, I think I just made up that proverb). In that spirit, I have been making my way in the past few years through Thomas Hardy's less visited back list: the novels he himself classed'or dismissed'as "novels of ingenuity" or "romances and fantasies," by contrast with his more serious "novels of character and environment" (i.e. the ones that we continue to rate now.)

Up till The Hand of Ethelberta, I was doing very well with this experiment. I liked the Wilkie Collins-ish Desperate Remedies (a "novel of ingenuity"), and I loved The Trumpet Major, a surprisingly humorous historical novel (a "romance or fantasy," in Hardy's terms.) Even The Well-Beloved, another "romance or fantasy," was striking, as well as bizarre.

The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) resembles The Well-Beloved in the oddness of its premise, as well as its double location, between an awkwardly rendered London and a far more vivid rural Dorset. Ethelberta is primarily about class. The eponymous heroine owes her would-be aristocratic name to an aspirational housemaid mother, and her father is a butler in a lordly London household. Ethelberta herself has some precarious pretensions to gentility, on the back of a brief, adolescent marriage to the son of a family in which she was acting as governess. Widowed young, she spends much of the novel trying to leverage her ladylike aura, and her beauty, to engineer a second marriage above her birth station. This has farcical aspects, as when Ethelberta sets herself up in a London house, a short let on which she has inherited as a grudging legacy from her husband's family, with a panoply of servants who turn out to be her many rustic siblings in disguise.

Critics have not been kind to Ethelberta. Coming as it does within Hardy's oeuvre after Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), and before The Return of the Native (1878), it seemed to many, at the time and afterwards, like an inexplicable backward lurch. (One critic in the 1950s compared Hardy's technical progress as a writer to "the homing of a drunk.") An aspect of the novel that has occasioned criticism, in particular, is its inconsistency of tone, and its odd mixture of comedy and melodrama. It is certainly a novel into which it is difficult to settle comfortably; it is as jolting as a nineteenth-century carriage ride.

I didn't hate this novel, however, despite all its problems; and I think that was in large part due to the character of Ethelberta. She is a strange, ironic creature, who sometimes seems as little caught up in her complicated story as many of her readers are. For all her scheming and plotting, Ethelberta retains a kind of devil-may-care detachment, which is very appealing. She is also an artist'a writer and performer'and some interesting recent critical readings see her as an alter ego for Hardy, which is a distinctly intriguing idea.

Nothing is going to make this a great novel, and I don't think I'd recommend it, but I'm not sure that anything by Hardy is really going to be worthless. Just when you think you have had enough, he comes up with something quite astonishing, like the hallucinatory scene when Ethelberta and her sister go to check out the country estate of a potential suitor and see a hideous knacker's yard of ancient horses being kept to feed the hounds'a vision of bleak cruelty that connects in oblique ways with the themes of the novel, and deepens its emotional range precipitously at one stroke.