The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) was by the author’s admission a “frivolous narrative” which was “produced as an interlude between stories of a more sober design.” Hardy wrote that in a preface to The Hand of Ethelberta in December 1895, the same year as the publication of his final novel, the brutal Jude the Obscure. If there is a note of embarrassed apology there, it may be that Hardy had surely by then found his true novelistic métier to be tragedy, having in the interim also written Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge.
The Hand of Ethelberta is instead a comedy of manners; no one dies. And it’s a half pastoral, half urban tale, divided between Hardy’s fictional Wessex (corresponding to the West Country), and London, with an additional excursion to Rouen. As can be guessed from its title, the novel is concerned with the marriage prospects of the titular and widowed Ethelberta Petherwin, twenty-one. As cannot be guessed, her hand also deigns to write poetry and prose which discloses her precocious knowledge of life’s trials. What impresses her suitors, among whom the sensitive painter Ladywell here will speak, is her courage in chronicling “what every woman would deny feeling in a society where no woman says what she means or does what she says.” Hardy’s sympathies, expansive as they are, seem to reach a limit before this Ladywell and other creatures of the drawing room and the theatre. They are drawn to a certain freshness and humility about her (her father, her secret, is a butler), but they think only to manipulate her into marriage, and the worst of them, the odious Lord Mountclere, will press that secret to his advantage.
The comedy, whose primary device and plot point is as always human miscommunication, is a strange venue to find again Hardy’s lavish attention to nature. A nocturnal ball-room dance, where Ethelberta excels with her “shining bunch of hair and convolvuluses”, carries over with weariness into the next morning. The music ended, the musician and Ethelberta enthusiast Christopher Julian raises the curtains for his sister and fellow player Faith to see:
A huge inflamed sun was breasting the horizon beyond a sheet of embayed sea which, to her surprise and delight, the mansion overlooked. The brilliant disc fired all the waves that lay between it and the shore at the bottom of the grounds, where the water tossed the ruddy light from one undulation to another in glares as large and clear as mirrors, incessantly altering them, destroying them, and creating them again.
The interior, before lively and gay, predictably suffers in caparison/comparison, as “[o]nly the gilding of the room in some degree brought itself into keeping with the splendours outside.” Chasing Ethelberta back to her humble village, Sandbourne, where her family lives, Christopher will hear her voice again, but in its proper element, her educated diction notwithstanding:
his ear caught, between the rustles, the tones of a voice in earnest declamation; and pushing round in that direction, he beheld through some beech boughs an open space about ten yards in diameter, floored at the bottom with deep beds of curled old leaves, and cushions of furry moss.
Ethelberta will later reach the London stage to tell her stories, but Hardy finds her most charming in this grove scene, regaling her younger siblings. She has a talent for language, lifting her out of her family’s condition, but there in the countryside the most important things go unsaid:
the calmness was artificially done, and the astonishment that did not appear in Ethelberta’s tones was expressed by her gaze. Christopher was not in a mood to draw fine distinctions between recognized and unrecognized organs of speech. He replied to the eyes.
Hardy’s London, a place defined by relentless chatter, mostly men talking about which of them Ethelberta favors, lacks the visual detail necessary to set off Ethelberta’s beauty against any kind of backdrop. There is the theatre, and there are Ethelberta’s lodgings, and Christopher’s. Picotee, Ethelberta’s sister, abruptly leaves her village teaching post and travels to the great city for the first time, as far as we know. Around a hundred and fifty words separate her disembarkation from the morning train and her arrival at Ethelberta’s door in Exonbury Crescent. The author makes clear his feelings about the city when he makes Christopher say, “Mediocrity stamped “London” fetches more than talent marked “Provincial””, with uncharacteristic pithiness.
Hardy’s pastoral preferences also have the effect of heightening (or lowering) the ignominy of Ethelberta’s father’s servile position, as we see in the fireplace-bound first draft of a letter she is to send to Christopher.
Had he been a brawny cottager, carpenter, mason, blacksmith, well-digger, navvy, tree-feller—any effective and manly trade, in short, a worker in which can [sic] stand up in the face of the noblest and daintiest, and bare his gnarled arms and say, with a consciousness of superior power, “Look at a real man!” I should have been able to show you antecedents, which, if not intensely romantic, are not altogether antagonistic to romance.
Ethelberta’s father is said to be “serenely happy and comfortable as a butler.” This only makes the situation more painful, as any menial rustic profession would be preferable to Ethelberta and to Hardy. Or to adapt Milton, whom Ethelberta is a little too keen on, better to reign on the heath than to serve in the hall.
Ethelberta does succumb to Lord Mountclere’s nuptial trickery, but with time, the wife always decides things. Her subtle mastery over her family prepares her for married life, and the remoteness of Mountclere’s Eckworth estate may help as well. In the “Sequel”, two and half years later, Christopher, driven to the vicinity of the manor, learns that she has her husband down to three glasses of wine a day, and church every Sunday.
She threatened to run away from him, and kicked up Bob’s-a-dying [a disturbance], and I don’t know what all; and being the woman, of course she was sure to beat in the long run.
Add to this that she has her family installed comfortably in a recently built house at Firtop Villa, and has Mountclere’s promise of five hundred pounds to Picotee upon her marriage.
Pastoral preoccupations and genre aside, Hardy did actually find his way to a “sober design” in this mostly neglected work. There is a lightness to the mood of the “Sequel”, and to Christopher’s belated proposal to Picotee, but Ethelberta is shown through hearsay to be strong enough to turn the wheels to her fortune. If the title of the novel is treated properly as synecdoche, one might find as much in the whole to admire as in a Tess Durbeyfield, though with some of Jude Fawley’s intellectual ambitions added, and here far better directed. An early passage introducing Ethelberta’s poetry prefigures the later talk of Milton, and echoes also the vision of the English Channel (“one undulation to another in glares as large and clear as mirrors”). There is whimsy in the woman’s work, but she may well be seeing her way to something more:
These ‘Metres by E.’ composed a collection of soft and marvellously musical rhymes, of a nature known as the vers de societé. The lines presented a series of playful defences of the supposed strategy of womankind in fascination, courtship, and marriage—the whole teeming with ideas bright as mirrors and just as unsubstantial, yet forming a brilliant argument to justify the ways of girls to men.