ABSTRACT
He talked freely about the characters in his books, how he thought people in the country were becoming more like them rather than less. The half-educated girl especially, he said, was growing like Tess or Sue (he thought Jude his greatest prose book, perhaps because it was his last?) Many girls of the same type wrote to him – small teachers, musicians, etc., some asking how they could get back to live in the country. He spoke a good deal about sport, how he had really induced one sportsman not to go out shooting one day; and he described the indignation of the neighbouring landowners because he had described their pheasant plantations in Tess, after which they had long refused to call on him (p. 179).
