ABSTRACT
ten years before the publication of A Pair of Blue Eyes, when Hardy was reading Shakespeare, attending the plays given by Samuel Phelps, and writing Shakespearean sonnets, he had memorized Sonnet CXI. He liked to quote the lines O! for my sake do you with Fortune chide, The guilty goddess . . . That did not better for my life provide. Fortune tended always to seem a 'guilty goddess' to Hardy, even when his luck proved to be good luck. In 1873, however, his fortune remained consistently good. A Pair of Blue Eyes was hardly a month old when Hardy received a letter from Leslie Stephen, editor of the Cornhill Magazine, asking him for a novel to be serialized in the magazine of which Thackeray had been editor a decade previously. Before the end of July Hardy had not only accepted Stephen's invitation, but had also, with justifiable pride in the growth of his reputation, had time to let his American publisher know about it. Doubtless to Hardy's surprise, Henry Holt wrote back, on July 27, 1873, to confess that he 'learned your intention of so soon publishing again with regret. Probably no one but Shakespeare has ever been able to accomplish the best class of work . . . with any rapidity.'
