Thomas Hardy: Landscapes of the Mind

In his Wessex novels, Thomas Hardy wrote about a rural society in crisis under the pressures of modernism. Yet it was Wessex itself – his fictitious creation – that most fascinated his readers, then and now.  I walked every inch of the settings for his novels. As I walked, what had begun as an exploration of Hardy’s use of folklore morphed inexorably into a fascination with the subtle changes he had made to the landscapes he knew so well – changes that turned nineteenth century Dorset into his fictional Wessex: his Landscapes of the Mind.