Sorrow is even more palpable in those poems that dwell on Hardy’s relationships: the poet began an affair with his secretary, Florence Dugdale, while still married to his first wife, Emma Gifford.

Asked at the beginning of Lent, which book I might turn to for consolation, I reach for Thomas Hardy’s poetry. I had heard of but never read Hardy when, more than a decade ago now, my English teacher told the class that we would be studying his Selected Poems for GCSE. Having been educated up till that point (with the exception of a bit of Chaucer and some Shakespeare) on a diet of books published after 1950, it was striking to encounter this rural, rather introspective voice from nineteenth-century Britain and to learn more about where his verse came from, literally and figuratively.

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