A Laodicean

**Thomas Hardy's Eighth Novel**

**A Heroine Torn Between Modernity and Medieval Romance**

**A Tale Built on Falsified Telegrams and Faked Photographs**

**First Serialized in Harper's New Monthly Magazine, 1880–81**

*One castle. Two suitors. A single word in the title that means "half-hearted." You will finish the novel understanding exactly why.*

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***A Laodicean; or, The Castle of the De Stancys. A Story of To-Day*** is the eighth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy, first published in 1880–81 in *Harper's New Monthly Magazine*. Paula Power inherits a medieval castle from her industrialist father, who had purchased it from the aristocratic De Stancy family. She employs two architects — one local, and one, George Somerset, newly qualified from London. Somerset represents modernity in the novel, while Captain De Stancy, an impoverished scion of the castle's former noble family, represents to Paula the allure of medieval nobility.

What Hardy constructed was not merely a love triangle. It was **a study of a divided heart**: a heroine caught between the pull of progress and the romance of the past. The plot exhibits devices uncommon in Hardy's other fiction, such as falsified telegrams and faked photographs — engineered by William Dare, the illegitimate and unrecognized son of Captain De Stancy, who schemes to promote his father in Paula's affections solely so he can continue to gamble off her income. **In the end, even the castle itself cannot survive the collision between these two worlds.**

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*"I wish my castle wasn't burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy\!"* *—Paula Power, A Laodicean*

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Dare's subterfuge is discovered by Captain De Stancy's sister Charlotte, who has befriended Paula and chooses to reveal the truth. Paula pursues Somerset to the continent, where the two are reunited and marry; in revenge, Dare burns down the castle using his family's portraits and furniture as kindling, and Somerset proposes to build a modern house in its place. The novel's closing line captures Paula's enduring dichotomy of mind — and, by extension, the two men who embodied it — while emphasizing the title's meaning: **a Laodicean**, someone indifferent or half-hearted.

*A Laodicean is a novel you can finish in a few evenings. Paula's divided heart — caught between two worlds, unable to fully let go of either — may stay with you far longer.*