‘A partly real, partly dream country’

‘The word “reputed” pokes a hole in the partition separating history from invention’

WE feel a frisson when a real place plays a key part in a novel. The Cobb at Lyme Regis will always be associated with silly Louisa Musgrove and her tumble in Jane Austen’s Persuasion and Knole in Kent with Virginia Woolf’s hero-heroine Orlando. Thomas Hardy, however, took the use of known locations to another level. He may have invented the characters in his novels, but he made them walk along actual roads, look across valleys at real views and live in recognisable villages and towns—sometimes, even in identifiable buildings.

As a result, fact and fiction can shade disconcertingly into each other. A blue plaque now on the wall of a handsome building in the centre of Dorchester—the model for Hardy’s Casterbridge—reads: ‘This house is reputed to have been lived