Grey Wethers by V. Sackville-West (1923)

This is the author's third 'Hardyesque' novel, and is intriguing from another point of view also - it's the only piece of fiction I've read set in and around Avebury (the Grey Wethers are a random group of unfinished sarcen stones in a nature reserve nearby). In terms of Sackville-West's catalogue, it's an ignored book, and I'm trying to work out why, because it's a lot more successful on the whole than her previous efforts. It manages to largely avoid the traps that caught her earlier novels: the first, Heritage, was fine but stiff; the second, The Dragon in Shallow Waters, was very fine but overheated for a while at the culminating point of passion; the third, Challenge, was oddly mixed in its style and intentions and also overheated. But this manages, on the whole, to restrain the passion within sane bounds, and to richly tell a notable story. In other words, it's a more uniform, controlled effort, and also lively. Set in the 1860s in King's Avon, which is Avebury thinly disguised, and on the high downs between it and Marlborough, it tells the story of the passion of Clare Warrener and Nicholas Lovel. She is the daughter of the big house, quite level-headed but inexperienced, still a looker-on at life. He is of gypsy extraction, a jack of all trades who has no truck with the society of the village - he is a figure of respectful suspicion; very few have ever seen the inside of his cottage, where he lives with his harridan bedbound mother and his slightly mis-shapen, intellectually disabled, lanky brother, Olver. Nicholas has always spent as much of his life as he can up on the downs, shepherding if at all possible, but takes on other work in the winter. Clare and he slowly form a bond which has surprising strength given their difference of background. A problem soon arises via Daisy Morland, a frowzy village girl who has set her heart on Lovel. Pregnant with another man's child, and seeing that Clare is desired by Calladine, a friend of Clare's father, who is dithering, scholarly, much older and lives in a Wuthering Heights-ish barren farm up near the downs, Daisy decides to claim that Olver is her child's father and that Nicholas must marry her to save her from disrepute and to atone for his brother's sins. Nicholas can see no way out, and as well is troubled by what he sees as the 'bad blood' in his family which he thinks caused Olver's disability. He decides at that moment that he must have no more to do with Clare. She, momentarily frozen out from him, and still the victim of her own inexperience, accepts a proposal of marriage from Calladine. This has strong echoes of Middlemarch and the relationship between Dorothea Brooke and Edward Casaubon. The marriage is doomed to awkwardness and sniping contest. Nicholas' to Daisy is doomed to suspicion and frostiness. Both Calladine and Daisy are interrogative and frustratedly stymied, while Clare and Nicholas are quiet and determinedly self-sufficient. Of course, Clare and Nicholas, reconciled, eventually run away onto the downs together, and our last view of them is running off into the silent snow at night after a pursuing Calladine has surprised them at Nicholas' shepherd's hut. This one has a limited but strong colour-pallette and a concentration of controlled energy which mark it as a major signpost of progress in the author's development.