Complete and unabridged, with 100 full-page plates by Johan Christian Dahl, J. M. W. Turner and Christoffer Wilhelm Eckersberg. A poor carter's daughter is sent to claim kin with a rich family who have simply bought the name, and everything that follows proceeds from that errand. Hardy subtitled it A Pure Woman and meant the provocation; the magazines made him cut and bowdlerize the book before they would serialize it, and the reviews were savage; he would write only one more novel. The Wessex here is a working country of threshing machines, hired gangs and quarter-day. A hundred plates of Constable and Morland—bridges, lock gates, farm horses, working landscapes—keep Hardy's country of hired labour and quarter-day before the eye throughout.