pp.170-71: '[Hardy] was always exceptionally anxious and sensitive about reviews.... He might have spared himself the trouble: the divide between those who disliked his language, his lower-class characters, his troubling women and his gloom, and those who appreciated the beauty and imaginative power of his work, was already there and remained firmly fixed throughout his career as a novelist.'
p. 147: '[Hardy's] is a voice that speaks to readers in many countries and to which successive generations have responded. With this voice Hardy established the territory in which he worked best in fiction, in which rural landscape is drawn with a naturalist's eye and country people are shown playing out their lives "between custom and education, between work and ideas, between love of place and experience of change."' (Raymond Williams)
Found for cheap at a Library store, one even has an old Borders sticker on the back,sigh.
On Oct 30, 2024, I accidentally left this book in Los Angeles. It was easily replaceable but the Stonehenge bookmark from our first trip to England was not. Thanks to my cousin Summer, both book and bookmark arrived back at my house in Utah on Apr 26, 2025!
p. 78: '[Hardy] could no longer believe, but he cherished the memory of belief, and especially the centrality and beauty of Christian ritual in country life, and what it had meant to earlier generations and still meant to some.'
p. 63: '[Hardy] went several times to hear Dickens read... and to hear John Stuart Mill speak on the hustings, and to the House of Commons to listen to Lord Palmerston. When Palmerston died, he got tickets for the funeral in Westminster Abbey, very conscious of the fact that the great man had stood in the House with Pitt, Fox, Sheridan and Burke. It was the personal link always that stirred Hardy's interest in history.'
p. xxii-xxiii: 'Hardy was a writer who made many of his best efforts out of incidents and stories he had collected and put aside, sights stored up, feelings he had kept to himself, anger he had not shown to the world. [As a poet] he is like an archeologist uncovering objects that have not been seen for many decades, bringing them into the light, examining them, some small pieces, some curious bones and broken bits, and some shining treasures.' ⬇️
panRead these Hardy novels before this one: Tess, Jude, Mayor of Casterbridge, Return of the Native, Desperate Remedies, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Trumpet Major, The Well Beloved. and don‘t read this one. It has all the Hardy hallmarks of astronomy, earnest lovers, and an unyielding English lanscape and social constructs that shape the fate of earnest lovers. But, the writing is clumsy, the science talk is too much, and the characters are dull.
