What does /lit/ think of Thomas Hardy?

I thought his Bane was kind of stupid, but overall great.

Great writer but I never really understood Bathsheba Everdene. She starts off a strong, shrewd businesswoman, then develops into a weak, fickle cunt. By the end of the book she's pretty much responsible for a man having a breakdown and going to prison but I'm somehow meant to be happy for her in the end. Fuck her.

>>8936660
He's a big guy.

>>8936660

His style is pretty grating.
He spends a lot of time telling you exactly what his characters are feeling.
I get that he is interested in the inner world and the psychology of it, but he literally spends like 70% of his novels just dissecting feels down to the molecular level. His novels are basically 600 page shitposts.

>>8936660

Really liked his depiction of the countryside in Return of the Native
Was underwhelmed by Jude the Obscure

>>8936780
>Was underwhelmed by Jude the Obscure

that's fighting talk where i come from anon

>>8936660
Hardy is the sort of author you read to impress lit chicks. Tell her how many tears you shed for Tess of the d'Urbervilles and how Jude the Obscure could never catch a break. For extra points, use "Chrisminster" instead of "Oxford" in your sentences and sigh as you confess your lifelong desire to explore to Hardy's Wessex (his name for South Western England) with a person close to you

>>8936835

I didn't say it's a bad book; I was just expressing my opinion
Tell me please what I missed

>>8936954
Not the guy you're responding to but I think Hardy's psychology of attraction (attraction to someone.something increases with the number of obstacles to obtaining it) provides a beautiful backing structure for the book. I will admit at times it did seem like Hardy was just being a dick to Jude. though. just placing unnecessary tragedies in his life. That said, I think the character is well enough developed that Hardy was genuinely interested in (and had little control over) how Jude reacted - on the page I feel he functions as a fully formed human being.

>>8936780
I was underwhelmed too. After hearing it was the most depressing book ever, I was kind of let down. It was a good book, but didn't give me the feels I thought it would.

>>8936660
I've read Tess and a few short stories, I've got Hand of Ethelberta on my shelf, can anyone persuade/dissuade me to read it?

>>8936872
Thanks, I'm gonna go try this on my mom. She's really hot btw.

How's his poetry? Now that I think about it, very few authors come to mind who are both true masters of both poetry and prose. Nabokov comes to mind with Pale Fire, and so does Oscar Wilde for juggling poetry, plays, prose, and essays

why do girls like him so much

>>8936755
It's just a realistic depiction of a woman

>>8939372
>Nabokov
>Wilde
>masters of poetry
sometimes I forget that this board has unironic shit taste

>>8939372
His poetry is superior to his novels IMO. The latter always feel relatively one-dimensional, contrived, melodramatic (Tess properly winds me up). That said, I like his short stories where due to the form those aren't such obvious defects (I encourage everyone ITT to read Wessex Tales). As a poet Hardy can be afflicted by that Victorian stuffyness the Modernists rebelled against, but he's a very sweet, understated versifier and one of the most varied formalists to have written in English.

Domicilium:

It faces west, and round the back and sides
High beeches, bending, hang a veil of boughs,
And sweep against the roof. Wild honeysucks
Climb on the walls, and seem to sprout a wish
(If we may fancy wish of trees and plants)
To overtop the apple trees hard-by.

Red roses, lilacs, variegated box
Are there in plenty, and such hardy flowers
As flourish best untrained. Adjoining these
Are herbs and esculents; and farther still
A field; then cottages with trees, and last
The distant hills and sky.

Behind, the scene is wilder. Heath and furze
Are everything that seems to grow and thrive
Upon the uneven ground. A stunted thorn
Stands here and there, indeed; and from a pit
An oak uprises, Springing from a seed
Dropped by some bird a hundred years ago.

In days bygone--
Long gone--my father's mother, who is now
Blest with the blest, would take me out to walk.
At such a time I once inquired of her
How looked the spot when first she settled here.
The answer I remember. 'Fifty years
Have passed since then, my child, and change has marked
The face of all things. Yonder garden-plots
And orchards were uncultivated slopes
O'ergrown with bramble bushes, furze and thorn:
That road a narrow path shut in by ferns,
Which, almost trees, obscured the passers-by.

Our house stood quite alone, and those tall firs
And beeches were not planted. Snakes and efts
Swarmed in the summer days, and nightly bats
Would fly about our bedrooms. Heathcroppers
Lived on the hills, and were our only friends;
So wild it was when we first settled here.'

too obsessed with his dead wife