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This episode is dedicated to a listener named Kastari and brought to you by Dancing on the Green.

Tonight we'll read an excerpt from Tess of the Gerberville's, a novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1891.

Hardy's writing often explores what he calls the ache of modernism and this theme is notable in Tess, which, as one critic noted, portrays the energy of traditional ways and the strength of the forces that are destroying them.

Now, considered a major work of its time, it received mixed reviews when it first appeared in part because it challenged the morals of late Victorian England.

Let's get cozy. Close your eyes.

Relax your body into the softness of your bed.

Now, take a few deep breaths.

Breaths.

The village of Marlotte lay amid the north-eastern undulations of the beautiful veil of Blakemore or Blackmore, an ingurtled and secluded region,

for the most part untrodden as yet by tourist or landscape painter, though within a four hours journey from London.

It is a veil whose acquaintance is best made by viewing it from the summits of the hills that surround it, except perhaps during the droughts of summer.

An unguided ramble into its recesses in bad weather is apt to engender distraction with its narrow and myriways.

This fertile and sheltered tract of country in which the fields are never brown and the springs never dry is bounded on the south by the bold chalk bridge.

The traveler from the coast, who, after plotting northward for a score of miles over downs and cornlands, suddenly reaches the verge of one of these escarpments, is surprised and delighted to behold, extended like a map beneath him.

A country differing absolutely from that which he has passed.

Behind him the hills are open, the sun blazes down upon filled so large as to give an unenclosed character to the landscape.

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