Into his story of a simple but beautiful country girl's seduction by another man which causes her husband to leave her on their wedding night and thereby precipitates a course of events that ends in murder, Hardy wove a luminous tenderness and longing. I have never been able to put on paper all that she is, or was to me, he said.

In defying convention and making a milkmaid the subject of tregedy, Hardy gave rein to his feeling for landscape and rural life - its harshness, seasonal rhythms and reminders of death and resurrection - and endows them with a brooding symbolism and visionary beauty.