Thomas Hardy | Boomers Daily

By STUART JEFFRIES

We Are Free to Change the World: Hannah Arendt’s Lessons in Love and Disobedience By Lyndsey Stonebridge

When Hannah Arendt looked at the man wearing an ill-fitting suit in the bulletproof dock inside a Jerusalem courtroom in 1961, she saw something different from everybody else. The prosecution, writes Lyndsey Stonebridge, ‘saw an ancient crime in modern garb, and portrayed Eichmann as the latest monster in the long history of anti-Semitism who had simply used novel methods to take hatred for Jews to a new level’. Arendt thought otherwise.

Sue Bridehead Revisited

By Norma Clarke

Hardy Women: Mother, Sisters, Wives, Muses By Paula Byrne

The title of Paula Byrne’s Hardy Women is a pun on Thomas Hardy’s name and a gesture to the enthusiasm that greeted Hardy’s fictional women. Bathsheba Everdene in Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess Durbeyfield in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Sue Bridehead in Jude the Obscure were new kinds of women, and Hardy’s fame, which was immense and began with the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd, rested to a large extent on the heroines he created. One young reader wrote to him of Tess, ‘I wonder at your complete understanding of a woman’s soul.’ Hardy’s discontented wife Emma wondered at it too. She observed, ‘He understands only the women he invents – the others not at all.’

Thomas Hardy's Wessex vs the real-life Dorset: Which bits are real, which dreams, and which are exact to the last stream and stile https://t.co/dUbSXEPE6i pic.twitter.com/3eEiKx88a0
— Country Life (@Countrylifemag) June 18, 2022

Thomas Hardy’s depictions of a fictional Wessex and his own dear Dorset are more accurate than they may at first appear, says Susan Owens.

We feel a frisson when a real place plays a key part in a novel. The Cobb at Lyme Regis will always be associated with silly Louisa Musgrove and her tumble in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Knole in Kent with Virginia Woolf’s hero-heroine Orlando. Thomas Hardy, however, took the use of known locations to another level. He may have invented the characters in his novels, but he made them walk along actual roads, look across valleys at real views and live in recognisable villages and towns — sometimes, even in identifiable buildings.

For all its operatic symbolism, Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) is a novel in which practical footwear matters. Among its heart-breaking moments is when Tess’s walking boots are discovered stuffed in a hedge where she had hidden them, mistaken for a tramp’s pair and taken away, forcing her to walk many miles back home along a rough road in pretty, but thin-soled, patent-leather ones.

A map depicting Hardy’s Wessex by Emery Walker, drawn for Tess of the d’Urbervilles. Credit: BBC / Album

Those who live in the country come to know land by ear as much as by eye. Hardy’s characters are expert in this — even in the dark and when drunk, as in Desperate Remedies (1871): ‘Sometimes a soaking hiss proclaimed that they were passing by a pasture, then a patter would show that the rain fell on some large-leafed root crop, then a paddling plash announced the naked arable.’