Hardy

Adam Kirsch, an American poet and critic, wrote: "The Hardys were the kind of people that Jane Austen would never have allowed into her parlour."
I'm not surprised. You don't have to know much about Thomas Hardy to appreciate that remark, you just have to read "At Casterbridge Fair" to understand the sort of feeling Hardy had about old age for example, stabbing to the heart any sentimentality and niceness other people might feel - or think they feel. It's nowhere near Browning's platitudinous kindlyness of "Grow old along with me, the best is yet to be."

"These market dames, mid-aged, with lips thin-drawn,
And tissues sere,
Are they the ones we loved in years agone,
And courted here?

Are these the muslined pink young things to whom
We vowed and swore
In nooks on summer Sundays by the Froom,
Or Bidmouth shore?"

Not that Austen was in any way sentimental in her portraying of her characters, it's just that she didn't have the nasty streak of truth that Hardy had.