Mapped
Jude the Obscure
Thomas Hardy
The stonemason Jude Fawley dreams of the university, but poverty, class and a doomed love for his free-thinking cousin Sue Bridehead break every hope, in Hardy's bleakest and most controversial novel. It maps his Wessex, drawn from real country: the village of his boyhood, the closed golden city of Christminster that will not have him, and the cathedral towns where he and Sue try and fail to live outside the rules.
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Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Thomas Hardy
When her poor family learns it descends from the noble d'Urbervilles, Tess Durbeyfield is sent to claim kin, is seduced and ruined by Alec, and later loves and loses the high-minded Angel Clare, driven at last to murder and the gallows. Hardy sets the tragedy across his Wessex, drawn faithfully from real Dorset: the vale of Tess's village, the d'Urberville estate, the rich dairy country where she finds love, the bleak upland farm of her suffering, and Stonehenge, where she is taken at dawn.
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
Thomas Hardy
Hardy's Casterbridge is Dorchester barely disguised: the Roman amphitheatre at Maumbury Rings where Henchard keeps his furtive meetings, the King's Arms on the High Street where the mayor holds his banquet, the corn-market where a hay-trusser who once sold his wife at a country fair has risen to preside, the Ten Hatches weir on the Frome where he goes to drown. Hardy mapped his home town so exactly he later published the keys. Only Weydon-Priors, drawn from Weyhill in Hampshire, sits well outside the town.
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