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Wessex Tales: The Distracted Preacher
By Frances , Moderator · 17 posts · 16 views
By Frances , Moderator · 17 posts · 16 views
last updated Dec 06, 2022 04:04AM
Wessex Tales: Interlopers at the Knap
By Frances , Moderator · 9 posts · 23 views
By Frances , Moderator · 9 posts · 23 views
last updated Nov 28, 2022 03:59PM
What Members Thought
~2.5-3 stars
This was my first Hardy novel and it won't be my last, with any luck. I don't know if all of his books are like this, as I've been told this was particularly gloomy, but I did like it. There wasn't really a plot, per se, but it was interesting more in the way a soap opera gets you involved in the character's lives. The women in the story are appalling, the men are pathetic, and the situations are tragic- but it all made for good reading.
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Have "enjoyed" the online discussion. A tragic story, of course. But Hardy brings so much to his novels, that they are always worth the investment.
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I love Thomas Hardy. My lecturer once the class that Hardy uses words to paint a picture. His more famous novel Tess of the D'Urbervilles definitely does this. Jude is quieter, it still has picturesque settings but it is not as dramatic as Tess.
I like this novel because it is astonishing how much society has changed. In Jude, he loses jobs and has to leave homes because he and Sue are not married. It is also not so taboo that they are cousins. Nowadays, cousins together are extremely taboo but n ...more
I like this novel because it is astonishing how much society has changed. In Jude, he loses jobs and has to leave homes because he and Sue are not married. It is also not so taboo that they are cousins. Nowadays, cousins together are extremely taboo but n ...more
Wowzers! This book really affected me. First of all, I could really commiserate with the main character through the tribulations of the first half of the book as he fell into the most basic conundrums of the human condition. I was also right there with him as he ranted against the social norms and institutions of his day. Everything was going so great, and then fate reached out its phantasmagorical knife and cut Jude’s artery open, bleeding his life out upon the pages like the Pig from the openi
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