Still on the Thomas Hardy trail here, passing Riverside Villa in Sturminster Newton where Hardy and his first wife, Emma, lived between 1876 and 1878, and where Hardy wrote 'The Return of the Native':
Still have a massive fondness for 'The Return of the Native', it being the first Hardy novel I read about 35 years ago.
In 'The Hardy Way: A 19th-Century Pilgrimage' (how I'm indebted to this wonderful book), Margaret Marande (2015: 97) explains that Hardy and Emma enjoyed the happiest years of their marriage at Riverside Villa, and that in 1916 and 1922, Hardy revisited the place "to recall his time" there with Emma (who died in 1912) "over 40 years before". Have read somewhere else that this didn't impress his second wife, Florence, of course.
On the way back to Sturminster Newton town centre, we passed this wonderful sign:
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