Beyond the Letters

My first acquaintance with Thomas Hardy in four key-points The bridge between times What has stricken me most about this book is how oddly it looks among other novels written on the verge of 19th and 20th centuries. The style of Hardy, strangely enough, reminds me of Jane Austen and Bronte sisters. It seems like this book has been lost in time and was written in 1891 by mistake. "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" is full of long descriptions and... the characters wear their hearts on their sleeves which is so rare for the novels of the period. What also makes it feel like an earlier novel is Gothic elements in the plot (by which I mean the scene in Stonehenge and strange dreams of Angel Clare which are depicted masterly I must say, they are best-written episodes in the book in my opinion). You won't find here the profound psychological study of characters like that of Henry James or Emile Zola nor blunt erotic scenes of David Lawrence. Still it couldn't be wr...

"Far from the Madding Crowd" is one of the first novels by Hardy which makes it much more optimistic than his later works like "Tess of the D’Urbervilles" or "Jude the Obscure", still if you think that early work always means "imperfect" I can assure you that it is not the case. In fact already here the author reveals his outstanding talent and produces one of his most bright and multifaceted female characters - Bathsheba Everdene. Not quite Victorian character The name of the main character - Bathsheba - was taken from the Bible. Bathsheba was the wife of Uriah the Hittite, one of the soldiers of Kind David's army and she was "very beautiful to look upon". When King David saw her bathing he couldn't stand her beauty, though Bathsheba herself didn't know he was watching her and didn't want to seduce him, and he ordered to bring the woman to his palace so that she would share bed with him. Thus Bathsheba's beauty...