Desperate Remedies, by Thomas Hardy

The story has a mysterious beginning. A young architect, Ambrose Graye, fell in love with a young lady, Cytherea, during his Christmas stay in London. Cytherea, "without positively encouraging him, tacitly assented to his schemes for being near her." However, when Graye proposed, she rejected it with apparent agony. Graye could never forget his first love, and the unobtainable became the absolute one shadowing his entire life. Grayed got married later and had a son, Owen, and a daughter, Cytherea, so named to remember his unforgettable love, who grew to be a most elegant young lady.

What follows is Hardy's eternal theme: Life is full of "accidents", and those so called accidents are there to install one back to the track of his fate, no matter how he struggles. Here the story continues. Graye died in an accident, and left his children in debts. They moved to a small town to seek new job opportunities. There Cytherea and Springrove, his brother's colleague, fell in love immediately at their first encounter, and the feelings grew stronger with each day. However, before his departure for London, Springrove told Cythrea that he had no right to love her because of something forbidding.

With increasingly worse financial situation, Cythrea had to advertise herself for a job of lady's maid, and was hired by Miss Aldclyffe, a lady not young anymore but was still remained with certain charm. Miss Aldclyffe turned out to be the Cytherea, Ambrose Gray's first lover. After Cytherea arrived, Miss Aldclyffe used tricks to recruit Mr. Manston to her estate as a steward. Mr. Manston was an extremely handsome young man, but a real villain. Miss Aldclyffe made all the opportunities for Manston to get close to Cytherea, and as Manston's accomplice she forced Springrove to give up Cytherea. However, one day, Manston's wife appeared, but was burned alive in a fire accident in the very night she arrived. Cytherea, in desperate situation to help his sick brother, agreed to marry Manston although she did not love him. After the couple left for honeymoon, Manston's first wife was reported seen alive after the fire. Manston at first denied such possibility in order to get Cytherea back, but suddenly changed his attitude and with surprising ease found his wife and brought her back from London. But who the lady is? Who Mr. Manston is, and what's his relationship with Miss Aldclyffe? Cytherea lived in a nightmare, and a thriller started.

This is the first book published by Thomas Hardy. In his desperate effort in getting it published, after his first book was rejected everywhere, Hardy intentionally made the book complicated with plots. I agree with critics that the story is over-plotted, disintegrated, and of inconsistent genres. However, the reading is still a delight surprise to me. I never imagine that our serious Thomas Hardy can write something like a thriller. This book is regarded by critics as a "false start" of Thomas Hardy, but I think the novel already shows a bit of Hardy's genius. His eternal theme on fate is there, although not fully developed as in later works. And his beautiful prose never disappoints me. Something worth mentioning is that the story of Cythrea and his lover Springrove bears some similarity with that in Jude the Obscure. And I am glad to see that the desperate love here ends happily. Maybe this is a comfort to Jude; whose penetratingly sad eyes I can't forget.

The book I read is from Penguin Classics series, with nice notes by editor Mary Rimmer. ISBN 0140435239. This edition uses the very first edition of the novel published in 1871. Rimmer described in the notes how Hardy revised the text in later editions. It is interesting to see how slight revisions were made here and there, and most of them made good sense.