Complete and unabridged, with 56 full-page plates by Caspar David Friedrich, William Quiller Orchardson and Jules Breton. 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 — a rehearsal for the storm over Jude, after which he gave up novels for good. The Wessex here is a working country of threshing machines, hired gangs and quarter-day. Fifty-six plates by painters including Constable and Millais, from 1793 to 1911, follow the rural girl, the harvest fields and the open road that Hardy's Wessex keeps in view.