A Laodicean - Thomas Hardy

A Laodicean is not one of Hardy’s best-known novels, but it has its special claims on our interest.

Hardy said that it contained more of his own life than any other novel and reflects his professional work as architect and restorer, his interest in engineering and technology, and his attempts to find the right style, in architecture, work and life.

It portrays central problems of Victorian culture, class, and the relationships of men and women through the love-story of George Somerset and Paula Power. He is an architect, poet, and expert in doctrines of adult and infant baptism, she is an heiress to an ancient pile, Castle de Stancy, and the wealth of her father, a railway millionaire.

Against Somerset’s professional eclecticism is pitted Paula’s female Laodiceanism, or luke-warmness. Her doubts and reluctance about baptism are paralleled in her waverings between modernism, Hellenism and mediaevalism, and in her amorous caprice and vacillations. As Hardy realized when asked if Sue Bridehead, in Jude the Obscure, was a New Woman, books grow beyond their immediate purpose and intention.

He could not anticipate the present interest in his portrait of a Victorian woman, with the ironical name of Power as befits her position and income, but typically hampered as an ill-educated woman with no outlet for energies and ambition, only a circle of eager suitors, and a choice of marriages.