Thomas Hardy is Still a Ticket to Rural England

Only one author has the power to consistently transport me from the reality of my present life in suburbia to the moors of 19^th centu ry England. From my college leisure to my mid-life to my retirement, I have sought escape through the novels of Thomas Hardy.

Hardy's plots always involve love, usually a triangle with two men vying for the same woman. The heroine in many of these tales, be she Tess of the D'Urbervilles, Eustacia of The Return of the Native, Grace of The Woodlanders, or a dozen others from Hardy's Wessex series, is described as beautiful but imperfect.

Hardy seems to sympathize mostly with the male characters that end up losing out on the girl. The most tragic of these unfortunate protagonists is The Mayor of Casterbridge, Michael Henchard, who loses not only his woman but also his daughter. Henchard's suffering is even greater than that of the sculptor in The Well-Beloved, who loves and loses his first woman, then her daughter, and then her granddaughter.

Their inevitable suffering is narrated sincerely but somehow objectively by Hardy, who seldom includes a happy ending. The man who loses the woman usually wins her heart, only after she has married the other.

In one novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Hardy has both men lose the object of their desire. The two men seem to suffer less because they share the loss, consoling each other as Elfreda rides away with the elderly widower she just married.

Though each romance is unique in the different novels, Hardy's best talent resides in his minor characters. Each novel seems to have an assortment of rural people who embody the rural England of the time. Hardy has made immortal such seemingly insignificant characters such as Timothy Snodgrass, Diggory Venn, Martin Cannister and Matthew Moon, all of whom help transport the reader to Hardy's Wessex.

I have tried many times to identify my single favorite Thomas Hardy novel, but the task is impossible. In college I swore that none could compare to The Mayor of Casterbridge, but the next summer I found myself favoring Under the Greenwood Tree. At other times my choice was Far from the Madding Crowd or Tess.

All of his novels offer a pleasurable view into a simple, rustic lifestyle about to be destroyed by the Industrial Revolution. Even titles that after first readings did not impress me, such as Desperate Remedies or The Trumpet-Major, I found more appreciation for after a second and third.

After all, you have never read a novel until you have read it twice, according to my second favorite author, W. Somerset Maugham. Though his style varied greatly from the creator of Wessex, Maugham, too, was a huge fan of Thomas Hardy.