This is the last of the Hardy fiction works in my list and I did not enjoy it as much as the others. The premise is a very odd one and, for all my appreciation of the great female characters that Hardy has created, has totally underdeveloped female characters and a rather unlikable male hero. Jocelyn is an aspiring and, later, successful sculptor whose main character trait seems to be proposing marriage after meeting any woman for more than 5 minutes. This plays out esp. in the unfortunate three generations of Avice Caro (only two are named Avice but why would he give a woman her own name?). The first Avice seemed a harmless flirtation that they both stepped away from but the both daughter and granddaughter just got creepy. I stopped looking for a larger theme when I was so turned off by the pursuit of generation 2. I have enjoyed my Hardy reading but I am not sure I will go back to this one.

For Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor who is the central figure in Thomas Hardy's “The Well-Beloved,” the object of his affection changes with the wind — or with the woman. What he thinks of as his Well-Beloved is not a real woman but an image, an ideal, a mirage.

In the opening pages he becomes engaged to two women. He jilts Avice to propose to Marcia, who then jilts him. Through the years of young manhood, he wanders from one Well-Beloved to another, never marrying any of them.

Hardy's novel skips ahead at 20-year intervals, so we next find Jocelyn at 40 meeting Avice's lovely daughter, also called Avice, who instantly becomes his new Well-Beloved. Yet she must turn down his proposal because she is already married, even if unhappily.

Twenty years later, Jocelyn at 60 spots the third Avice, a girl even lovelier than her mother or grandmother at the same age. His chances of marrying her look good, especially with her mother working to make the marriage happen. She missed her chance to marry the wealthy artist and wants her daughter to take advantage of her own opportunity.

Hardy gives us some plot twists at the end that add interest to a short novel that otherwise seems artificial and bland. Yet a few years after this book was published, Hardy himself would marry a woman 39 years younger than him. So maybe the story is not quite as fanciful as it may appear. ( )

I didn't get the usual satisfaction from reading a Thomas Hardy novel. It seems to be an exercise of fitting characters into ideas. The hero, Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor, is looking for the ideal woman and develops consecutive platonic relationships with three generations of Avice Caro. It is a bit far-fetched. In the end Jocelyn's quest is superseded by grim reality and a loss of appreciation of anything artistic, also a pessimistic outcome. The action takes place in Portland and London, two different worlds. ( )

This is the last novel that Thomas Hardy wrote although the story was serialized in a somewhat different form about five years before. I thought this book was lighter in tone than Jude the Obscure which probably derives from the fact that the idea was conceived before Jude.

Jocelyn Pierston, an up and coming sculptor, returns to his birthplace on the Isle of Slingers (the name Hardy gives the Isle of Portland) to visit his father who is a successful stonecutter on the island. He stops in to see his neighbours, the Caros, and young Avice Caro kisses him on the lips as she used to when they were children. She is embarassed to be so bold with him now that he is grown up. This action makes Jocelyn realize that Avice is a lovely young woman and he courts her during his stay on the island. This is not the first time Jocelyn has been in love; he has been in pursuit of the Well-Beloved for years but his female ideal moves from woman to woman often. Jocelyn asks Avice to marry him despite his fear that the Well-Beloved might not continue to be Avice; she consents. When it is time for him to return to London he asks Avice to take one last walk with him. Avice, fearful that Jocelyn will want to follow the island custom by having pre-marital intercourse and only marry if Avice becomes pregnant, sends a note explaining that she will not meet him. As Jocelyn walks over to the mainland he meets another young woman, Marcia Bencomb, who is fleeing her father. Mr. Bencomb is the chief business rival of Jocelyn's father. A storm forces them to take shelter together and Jocelyn's habit of falling in love with a new woman causes him to fall in love with Marcia. He asks her to marry him and she assents. Before they can be married (but possibly after they have had intercourse as Hardy seems to hint) Marcia goes back to her father and they leave the country on a long journey. Meanwhile Avice has married a cousin.

Jocelyn continues to remain a bachelor although his "Well-Beloved" appears a number more times. He becomes an Academician and his sculpture is admired. When he is forty he hears that Avice has died and he returns to the island for her funeral. There he meets her daughter and falls for her as well. Circumstances prevent him marrying her. Again when he is sixty he returns to the island and meets the third Avice. Although he is forty years older than Avice Three he falls in love with her.

This being Hardy there is no happy ending for Jocelyn and Avice but the ending is not completely bleak.

This edition also contains the earlier serialized version which is called The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved. I haven't read the entire thing but glancing at the ending it seems that it is quite different from the novel. Obviously Hardy edited quite a bit before it was published. ( )

3904. The Well-Beloved A Sketch of Temperament, by Thomas Hardy (read 27 June 2004) I have read with much appreciation all the best-known novels of Hardy, but Harold Bloom in his Western Canon includes this work too, and since I had not read it I decided to do so. It is the last of Hardy's novels to be published (in 1897). It tells a light story of Jocelyn Pierston, from the Isle of Portland (a peninsula on the south coast of England), at ages 20, 40, and 60. It is funnier than Hardy's usual work, And really quite good and worth reading. ( )