In more senses than one, Hardy took the * regional novel into new territory. Other novelists had created imaginary landscapes for their novels, but Hardy, more than any novelist since Sir Walter Scott, grounded his fictional world on a living sense of the earth, of folk tradition and history. The land itself becomes a central element in the narrative, and the vibrant individuality of his characters stand in precarious relationship to the physical presences of earth and sky. Hardy is a great original, a novelist whose work both culminates and reacts against the achievement of the Victorian novel. While he shared the contemporary interest in realism and solidly realized his scenes and characters, he was hostile to materialism and his fiction is closer to poetry than to realist prose. Flouting the conventions of the well-made plot, he created some of the most compelling narratives in English fiction. Hardy was born the son of a stonemason and jobbing builder in the little Dorset hamlet of…