Thomas Hardy

A Laodicean a Story of To-day Annotated Thomas Hardy

A Laodicean or, The Castle of the De Stancys. A Story of To-Day is a novel by Thomas Hardy, 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. In the village there is an amateur photographer, William Dare, the illegitimate son of Captain De Stancy, an impoverished scion of that family. Captain De Stancy represents to Paula the notion of medieval nobility. She is attracted to each man for his respectively different virtues.