Thomas Hardy's Wessex Thomas Hardy's Wessex The English author Thomas Hardy set all of his major novels in the south and southwest of England. He named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in this part of that country prior to the unification of England by Æthelstan. Although the places that appear in his novels actually exist, in many cases he gave the place a fictional name. For example, Hardy's home town of Dorchester is called Casterbridge in his books, notably in "The Mayor of Casterbridge". In an 1895 preface to the novel "Far From the Madding Crowd" he described
Georgian society in Jane Austen's novels homes in which Jane Austen's novels are set are all situated in the southern half of England, and with the sole exception of Mansfield Park, in counties and towns she knew personally. It is characteristic of Jane Austen's period that all sorts of houses exist there side by side, houses of very different origins, periods and status, and that the characters in her novels are sensitive to these differences. This diversity is the reflection of the successive strata of the English habitat. Jane Austen's heroines thus occupy cottages (Barton Cottage in "Sense and Sensibility"), abbeys converted into vast residences (the