It so happened last week, just before we were about to start the first session of our four week run on The Novel (in the Level 4 Introduction to English Studies skills module), that a newspaper article appeared reporting the discovery of the mortal remains of one Martha Brown in the grounds of a Dorchester prison. Brown was condemned to death by hanging in 1856 for the murder of her violent husband, one of the last executions of this kind in England. The event was attended by the 16 year old Thomas Hardy, apparently traumatised by the incident, so much so that he used the personage and the story leading to the hanging as raw material for one of his most famous novels, the late work Tess of the D’urbervilles, published 1892, more than half a lifetime after the grim spectacle. Coincidence wills it that this very novel is featured as specimen in our session on the novel in the above mentioned module. I could not have wished for a more fitting and timely introduction to studying the novel as a reality-bound literary form. The episode profiles the doctrine of Realism in stark relief…
