The bad old times recorded
The inconsistency between how they lived their own lives — the sort of people that they seemed to be — and the virtues they championed in their heroes and heroines, so much greater in male than in female authors (from which category I exclude George Eliot) is possibly nowhere more marked than in the case of Thomas Hardy. The creator of Marty South, Giles Winterborne and Gabriel Oak was himself a stinker. ‘ ’E didn’t ’ave nothing to say to the likes o’ we,’ our old gardener used to say. Born in Bockhampton, and familiar in his boyhood with the presence of the great man if not his notice, he had no opinion of him.