The Novel and Hardy's Wessex
- Hardy first employed the term "Wessex" in Far from the Madding Crowd to describe the "partly real, partly dream-country" that unifies his novels of Southwest England. He found the word in the pages of early English history as a designation for an extinct, pre-Norman Conquest kingdom. In the first edition, the word "Wessex" is used only once, in chapter 50; Hardy extended the reference for the 1895 edition.
- The village of Puddletown, near Dorchester, is the inspiration for the novel's Weatherbury. Dorchester, in turn, inspired Hardy's Casterbridge.
- In The Mayor of Casterbridge, Hardy briefly mentions two characters from Far from the Madding Crowd– Farmer Everdene and Farmer Boldwood, both in happier days.
Read more about this topic: Far From The Madding Crowd
Famous quotes containing the word hardy:
“Nothing would improve newspaper criticism so much as the knowledge that it was to be read by men too hardy to acquiesce in the authoritative statement of the reviewer.”
—Richard Holt Hutton (1826–1897)