Anxious Pleasures
James Wood: Thomas Hardy, 4 January 2007
Thomas Hardy: The Time-Torn Man
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 486 pp., £25, October 2006,0 670 91512 2 Show More
by Claire Tomalin.
Viking, 486 pp., £25, October 2006,
“... an English Emma Bovary, looking longingly at Paris as the escape from the provincialism of Egdon Heath. Elizabeth, in The Mayor of Casterbridge, occasionally lapses into dialect, ‘those terrible marks of the beast to the truly genteel’, Hardy remarks. Corrected speech is one of the things that sets Tess apart from her impoverished family. Hardy’s ... ”