Hardy's final novel was so savagely attacked that he never wrote fiction again. Victorian England was not ready for this story of a stonemason who dreams of Oxford, of doomed love and dead children, of a world that crushes those who dare to want more than their station allows. The prose is heavy with fate, the Wessex landscape brooding and indifferent. When Hardy's own tombstone was carved, the words 'Done because we are too menny' were never far from the carver's mind. A novel that feels less read than endured, and unforgettable for it.