Visiting the Dorset home of one of my favourite authors.
I was in Dorset last month and visited the cottage where Thomas Hardy was born and where he wrote his earlier novels, including Far From The Madding Crowd and Under The Greenwood Tree.
Once he'd achieved some level of success, Hardy built himself a grander home in Dorchester - views of which he would once have been able to see from this cottage - but as a huge Hardy fan it was thrilling to wander round his first home, and easy to picture him looking out of his window (pictured below) as he created some of 19th-century England's most beloved characters.
It's the garden I loved the most, however, although it's very much not as it would have been in Hardy's day. I sat with Dottie and Pippa on an old wooden garden bench, surrounded by flowers and spent a happy hour thinking of the Hardy books I'd devoured as a teenager. I loved them all except for Jude The Obscure, which I'll never reread. (Too much misery for me.) I decided I'd reread Tess of The Durbervilles, my favourite Hardy story. Like thousands of other people my age, I studied this for 'O' level at school. It was, I always think, the perfect book to teach to teenagers with their raging hormones and love of high drama. I learnt and was shocked, I remember, to find out that not every central character gets a good ending in a book.
After the cottage, we visited St Michael's Church in Stinsford to see Hardy's grave - or the grave where his heart is buried. The rest of him resides in Westminster Abbey, in Poet's Corner. A few metres down from Thomas' heart in this quiet village graveyard, lies Cecil Day-Lewis, who wanted to be buried near his literary hero.
I've saved Hardy's other house - Max Gate - for my next visit to Dorset. But in the meantime, I'm going to spend some time wandering through the Wessex countryside, with Tess.
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