Novelists, sociological v. geographical : Thomas Hardy

Some passages in "Tess of the D'Urbervilles" clearly show Thomas Hardy at his best and remind us why, despite his occasional quaintness and faux bucolia, he remains one of the 19th-century writers we still read. For Hardy, landscape establishes character - if Faulkner, Tolstoy, Balzac, Dickens each create an entire society through their fiction, if they are something like sociological novelists, Hardy is a geographical novelist. Tess is formed by the landscape she passes through, and the different "phases" (as he calls them) of the novel, are dominated by their distinct topology: the dark forest in which Tess is raped, the long treacherous ride down the steep mountainside into the village of Tantridge (?), the enclosed nature of Tess's home village of Marlott, now in "phase" 3 (The Rally) her arrival in the open, alluvial planes - the land of large dairies (as opposed the small dairies of her native village), and nobody devotes more exquisite attention to these details than Hardy, noticing not only the open land and the vast dairy farms but even the way the water flows in the streams and how that characterizes the culture, the society. In this new landscape, Tess can relinquish her suffering and guilt over her "fall," and can, it seems, begin a new life. You'll probably learn more about dairy farming than you'll ever want to know, but the compensations are some beautiful writing, an occasional stunning insight (a passage on the strangeness of how music composed centuries ago can be in accord with our innermost feelings and emotions today, the dead speaking to us and living through us), and one of the last great 19th-century tapestry novels in which an entire life unfolds across the narrative.