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Passage Realised

‘If I had him — a lover, I would ask him to come if I wanted him to.’

Ethelberta did not give her mind to this remark; but, drawing a long breath, said, with a pouting laugh, which presaged unreality, ‘The idea of his getting indifferent now! I have been intending to keep him on until I got tired of his attentions, and then put an end to them by marrying him; but here is he, before he has hardly declared himself, forgetting my existence as much as if he had vowed to love and cherish me for life. ’Tis an unnatural inversion of the manners of society.’

‘When did you first get to care for him, dear Berta?’

‘O — when I had seen him once or twice.’

‘Goodness — how quick you were!’ [punctuation revised for the volume edition]

‘Yes — if I am in the mind for loving I am not to be hindered by shortness of acquaintanceship.’

‘Nor I neither!’ sighed Picotee. [Chapter XIX, "Ethelberta's Drawing-room," 490]

Commentary: A Typical du Maurier Drawing-room Scene

The fourth plate realizes a confidential dialogue between Picotee and Ethelberta, during which the younger girl expresses surprise at Berta's celerity in falling in love with Christopher. Du Maurier was obviously taken with the na•ive younger sister's response. Ethelberta, taller and with a more ordered hairstyle, stares out the window, waiting for Christopher Julian to call after a quarrel. Picotee, in one of her sister's cast-off dresses, studies Ethelberta, trying to understand her sentiments about love in general and about her on-again/off-again relationship with Christopher in particular. One cannot help but wish Du Maurier had chosen the amusing Joey as his main plate's subject since the conversation between Picotee, secretly in love with Christopher, and Ethelberta, torn by conflicting emotions about the same man, offers so little visual interest. The artist certainly felt that the narrative moment between the two sisters is significant, despite its making a lacklustre illustration. A more telling line to have illustrated for the fourth plate is Sol's remarking to his high-society sister, "you keep to your class, and we'll keep to ours" (p. 139). Another significant moment occurs just afterwards, when Christopher and Ethelberta reveal their true feelings towards one another, only to be interrupted by Joey's announcement that Mr. Ladywell has called. [Allingham, pp. 62-63]

Related Material

• An Introduction to the plates

Bibliography

Allingham, Philip V. "Part Two: Du Maurier's Twenty-Two Illustrations for the Cornhill Magazine's Serialisation of Thomas Hardy's The Hand of Ethelberta, July, 1875-May, 1876." The Thomas Hardy Year Book No. 40: Hardy's Artists by Philip Allingham. Guernsey: Toucan Press, 2012. 58-66.

Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. The Cornhill Magazine. Vol. XXXII (1875).

Hardy, Thomas. The Hand of Ethelberta: A Comedy in Chapters. Intro. Robert Gittings. London: Macmillan, 1975.

Jackson, Arlene M. Illustration and the Novels of Thomas Hardy. Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1981.

Page, Norman. "Thomas Hardy's Forgotten Illustrators." Bulletin of the New York Public Library 77, 4 (Summer, 1974): 454-463.

Sutherland, John. "The Cornhill Magazine." The Stanford Companion to Victorian Fiction. Stanford, Cal.: Stanford U. P., 1989. 150.

Vann, J. Don. "Thomas Hardy (1840-1928. The Hand of Ethelberta in the Cornhill Magazine, July 1875-May 1876." in Victorian Novels in Serial. New York: The Modern Language Association, 1985. 83.

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