Wessex

[godhelpme2]

I attended the class of "the history of Literature" this morning, and felt quite puzzled at the term" the Wessex novels" ,which was used by our teacher when mentioning Thomas Hardy. Does anybody can offer me a hand?

[Scheherazade]

You might find these sites useful:

http://members.aol.com/thardy1001/wessex.html

http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/hardy/intro.html

And good luck studying Hardy!

[Whifflingpin]

Wessex was (just over a thousand years ago) a kingdom that covered the central southern part of what is now England. The term is still commonly used to mean, more or less, England south of the river Thames.

If you look on a modern map that shows English counties, then the counties of Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Wiltshire, Somerset, Berkshire and Surrey all belong in Wessex. Sometimes Sussex and Kent are included as well.

Hardy lived much of his life in Dorset, and those of his novels that are set in or close to Dorset are known as his Wessex novels. Most of them could just be called "Dorset novels," but "Wessex novels" gives (to an English person) an idea of ancient countryside and slow-changing people. (Of course, to a person from China, the idea that a thousand years makes something ancient, is probably laughable.)

Unfortunately, although his novels usually describe real places, he changed all the names. So, "Casterbridge" is his name for Dorchester, for example. If you need to know the real names of places in the books, I expect that the websites that Scher refers to might give you a list.

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[godhelpme2]

Thank you very much!!!!

[kelby_lake]

They normally have a map of Wessex at the beginning of all of Hardy's Wessex novels. The highest it goes up to I think is Christminster (Oxford).

[kev67]

I have come to the conclusion that Wessex is a sort of malevolent fairyland, an alternative reality to rural, 19th century England. Natural and even man-made laws don't quite apply.