The expressive eye

by J. B. Bullen

Each of Thomas Hardy's novels is filled with striking visual images - characters, interior settings, buildings, village scenes, and open tracts of land. These images are all rendered with a vitality and energy immediately recognizable as Hardy's own. In fact, Hardy, whose style owed much to his abilities as a draughtsman, (he trained and worked as an architect) once remarked that he saw his narratives as a series of images.