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The ultimate and archetypal cliff-hanger?
See David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992), "Suspense", on Thomas Hardy:
See David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (1992), "Suspense", on Thomas Hardy:
'A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), was more lyrical and
psychological, drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife in the romantic
setting of north Cornwall ,
and was the favourite novel of that master of modern autobiographical fiction,
Marcel Proust. But it contains a classic scene of suspense that was, as far as
I know, entirely invented. The word itself derives from the Latin word meaning
"to hang", and there could hardly be a situation more productive of
suspense than that of a man clinging by his finger-tips to the face of a cliff,
unable to climb to safety - hence the generic term, "cliffhanger". '
Originally published in The Independent on Sunday
O the opal and the sapphire of that wandering western sea...
As we laughed light-heartedly aloft on that clear-sunned March day.
(Beeny Cliff - poem animation)
The far-down moan
Of the white selvaged and empurpled sea
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