Jude The Obscure – Thomas Hardy, 1895 ★★

The Cruelest Art

As is so with butchers and lawyers, being a good novelist requires more than a little healthy sadism. Needs of drama and conflict require putting characters through the wringer, even (especially?) those you like.

Perhaps Thomas Hardy minded that as, after Jude The Obscure, he left novels behind and switched to poetry.

If so, he made sure he got every last dreg of cruelty out of his system by spilling it on the page of his final manuscript.

Far From The Madding Crowd – Thomas Hardy, 1874 ★★★½

The Perils of Gaslighting

When a pretty woman flirts with a middle-aged man, you might expect annoyance when he discovers she’s having him on. You don’t expect carnage, which is what happens in this pastoral romantic tragicomedy by Thomas Hardy, Victorian fiction’s master of disaster.

The second of Hardy’s celebrated run of “Wessex” novels, Far From The Madding Crowd details the calamitous romantic history of Bathsheba Everdene, inheritor of a substantial farm in her early twenties who sends a prank valentine to a bachelor named Boldwood who owns the neighboring spread.

The Return Of The Native – Thomas Hardy, 1878 ★★

A Character and Setting in Search of a Plot

Every good character in fiction deserves a name as singularly memorable as Eustacia Vye, and a setting as breathtakingly depicted as Egdon Heath.

You know what else is nice to have? An engaging story that doesn't play out like a series of tragic contrivances.

As Thomas Hardy would be the first to remind us, you can't have everything.