63 pages • 2 hours read
Thomas HardyA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Hardy establishes Egdon Heath as the setting. It is based upon Wessex, England, where he grew up. Wild and uncivilized, filled with rounds, hollows, thorns, moss, stumps, barrows, and furze, one can barely penetrate it except by following the road cutting through it. Untouched by the vicissitudes of life experienced by the villages, the people, and even the natural elements of field and river, Egdon Heath remains the same. The heath takes on a vitality of its own and becomes a character in the story, an animated but desolate expanse of terrain challenging its occupants, which Hardy calls “a face upon which time makes but little impression” (9).
An old man walks down the road, supported by his walking stick. A man of substance and authority, he might be a naval officer. He peers ahead and sees a peculiarly lurid red van. The driver, who walks beside the van, is himself red from top to toe, a “reddleman” who supplies reddle, a red ochre, used by farmers to mark their sheep. The narrator describes him as a “nearly perished link between obsolete forms of life and those which generally prevail” (13).
By Thomas Hardy
Appearance Versus Reality
View Collection
British Literature
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Class
View Collection
Fate
View Collection
Marriage
View Collection
Romance
View Collection
School Book List Titles
View Collection
Valentine's Day Reads: The Theme of Love
View Collection
Victorian Literature
View Collection
Victorian Literature / Period
View Collection