Two on a Tower

Abstract

In January 1882, when Hardy agreed to write Two on a Tower, he had reached a point almost exactly midway in his career as a writer of prose fiction. He had shown his creative gifts in a number of works, most of all in Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, but his greatest tragedies were still to come. The kind of ‘charity’ or altruism which inspires them is more clearly and confidently voiced in Two on a Tower, their immediate forerunner, than ever before. More than any other of his novels it combines all those elements, including tragedy and humour, which Hardy had in mind when he divided his fiction into three categories: ‘Novels of Character and Environment’, ‘Romances and Fantasies’, and ‘Novels of Ingenuity’.

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