Complete and unabridged, with 60 full-page plates by William Powell Frith, John Constable and Johannes Bosboom. A young woman with no money takes a post as a lady's maid to a wealthy spinster, and finds that the household's secrets involve the architect she once loved. Hardy published it anonymously at thirty-one, after paying his own guarantee against loss, and wrote it to a publisher's brief: give us a plot with mystery in it. The Wessex he would spend his life mapping is already visible underneath the sensation. Sixty plates of English landscape and figure painting by Constable and Rossetti, from river barges to church porches, carry the novel's own current of hidden feeling.