'A partly real, partly dream country'

Thomas Hardy's depictions of a fictional Wessex and his own dear Dorset are more accurate than they may at first appear, says Susan Owens

- By Susan Owens

WE feel a frisson when a real place plays a key part in a novel. The Cobb at Lyme Regis will always be associated with silly Louisa Musgrove and her tumble in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Knole in Kent with Virginia Woolf’s hero-heroine Orlando. Thomas Hardy, however, took the use of known locations to another level. He may have invented the characters in his novels, but he made them walk along actual roads, look across valleys at real views and live in recognisable villages and towns—sometimes, even in identifiable buildings.

As a result, fact and fiction can shade disconcertingly into each other. A blue plaque now on the wall of a handsome building in the centre of Dorchester—the model for Hardy’s Casterbridge—reads: ‘This house is reputed to have been lived in by the MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE in THOMAS HARDY’s story of that name written in 1885.’ The word ‘reputed’ pokes a hole in the partition separating history from invention and lets through an unsettling draught.

Needing a name for the large region, including his native Dorset, in which his characters lived, worked, loved and died, Hardy revived that of the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covered south-west England: Wessex. He kept some place names almost intact—the Blackmoor Vale, for instance, Giant’s Hill and Stonehenge—but, for others, he invented an equivalent, often with an echo of the original: Cerne Abbas became Abbot’s-Cernel; Wey- mouth, Budmouth; and Bere Regis, Kingsbere.