Early English Novels (reading Spree #2)

11 months after my first post, I have finally read enough “early English” novels to write a part 2. This was less of a self-contained spree than my first endeavour, and I did take breaks to read other things which I have omitted from this post in order to keep things a bit more focused. Still, as I alluded to at the end of my last post, my plan was to read a couple books from each of: Dickens, Hardy and Eliot after which I would no doubt feel satisfied and able to move onto a different pocket of literature – maybe modernism or American lit. Things, however, did not go to plan. Far From the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy Of all the novels I read across both sprees, this is the only one I feel deserves to be much more forgotten than it already is. It tells the story of a love square centered on Bathsheba Everdene, who inherits a farm from her uncle and decides she will run it herself against societal expectations. If this sounds like the start of an underdog, feminist narrative to you,…