A young architect is sent to a remote Cornish parish to survey a church tower and falls in love with the rector's daughter; so, later, does the London critic who reviews his work. Hardy had been that architect, restoring churches for a living, and he set the novel on the cliffs he knew — where he also invented the cliffhanger, quite literally, in the most famous chapter. Fifty-nine plates of painting, from Millet's harvesters to Thomas Hill's Yosemite Valley, set beside Hardy's cliffs the wide world of nineteenth-century landscape that shaped his eye.
