Wessex

English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. His tragic tales, set in the fictional county of ‘Wessex’, received a hostile reception from the public. Attacked for his attitudes to marriage and religion, he abandoned fiction to concentrate on his poetry. He published eight volumes, including a series of elegies to his first wife Emma Gifford.

Kingdom of the West Saxons in Britain, said to have been founded by Cerdic about AD 500, covering Hampshire, Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, and the former county of Berkshire. In 829 Egbert established West Saxon supremacy over all England.

Thomas Hardy used the term Wessex in his novels for the southwest counties of England; drawing on England's west country, the heartland was Dorset but its outlying boundary markers were Plymouth, Bath, Oxford, and Southampton. He gave fictional names to such real places as Dorchester (Casterbridge), Salisbury (Melchester) and Bournemouth (Sandbourne), but mixed these with a sprinkling of real names such as Stonehenge, the River Frome, and Nettlecombe Tout.