Dacre stoker biography graphic organizer

My junior year of high school, our class was assigned to read Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native.  Most of the class moaned and groaned about reading another book about staid Victorian people in corsets and bowler hats strolling about being polite to each other.  But instead, what we got was a book that changed my entire perception of literature, and historic literature, specifically.

Because Thomas Hardy didn’t write polite novels.  He didn’t write traditional morality tales that showed young ladies how to marry well, or how a gentleman could succeed in life by remaining sober and wearing cravats.  Instead, he talks about people who make mistakes; big mistakes–the kind that can change and ruin lives.  He talks about people who feel passion, who act on that passion, and who thrive because of it.  And he does it all in a way that makes you feel their needs, sympathize with the sorrow and the joy they feel, and to be willing to follow the story through all the mistakes and hardships and triumphs because these people are so real and so beautifully flawed that it’s impossible to turn away.

Granted, Hardy was not a fan of general polite Victorian culture, because he saw through the façade that people so earnestly tried to put around themselves.  In his diary, Hardy noted: “If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!”  And those are the kind of characters he created.

Hardy also gave the women in his novels agency, realizing how trapped they were by the society in which they lived, and how little they were normally allowed to speak.  As the great Bathsheba notes in Far From the Madding Crowd, “It is difficult for a woman to define her feelings in language which is chiefly made by men to express theirs.”  To be fair, Vi