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'It was in the chapters of Far from the Madding Crowd...that I first ventured to adopt the word 'Wessex,'' wrote Thomas Hardy and so described the birth of that fictional region in the southwest of England where the hauntingly familiar names - Egdon Heath, Christminster, Casterbridge - have come to evoke the melancholy grandeur of Hardy's world. The rural sheep-raising country of this early novel escapes the gloom that permeates the landscape and he characters of such later tragedies as Jude the Obscure and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. But the relentless accidents of an indifferent nature, combined with the ill-fated passions of beautiful Bathseba Everdene and her lovers, create the thwarted purposes and shattering griefs that make this a characteristically powerful Hardy novel.
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