“I have seldom known a man cunning with his brush who was not simple with his tongue; or, indeed, any skill in particular that was not allied to general stupidity.”
– from The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy is one of my favorite Victorian writers, mostly due to the magic depiction of the fictitious Wessex county and Egdon Heath in The Return Of The Native.

Thomas Hardy’s Wessex is the fictional literary landscape as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area “Wessex” after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name.

Art – Josef Stoitzner – After the Rain, 1925.