"the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation for the world," Thomas Hardy

Sue Bridehead in Jude The Obscure (1895):  

Her eyes met his, and remained on him awhile. 

"We are rather a sad family, don't you think, Jude?" 

"She [their recently deceased aunt] said we made bad husbands and wives. Certainly we make unhappy ones. At all events, I do, for one!

Sue was silent. "Is it wrong, Jude," she said with a tentative tremor, "for a husband or wife to tell a third person that they are unhappy in their marriage? If a marriage ceremony is a religious thing, it is possibly wrong; but if it is only a sordid contract, based on material convenience in householding, rating, and taxing, and the inheritance of land and money by children, making it necessary that the male parent should be known-- which it seems to be-- why surely a person may say, even proclaim upon the housetops, that it grieves him or her?"

"I have said so, anyhow, to you."

The character of Sue Bridehead, her strength, her flashing brilliance, what Jude loves above all else, is the revelation here. Tess had her own mind but not like this. Otherwise, forgot how much I liked Hardy's doomed romanticism. His rural Wessex is indelible; my most lasting impression of the British Shire prior to the Lord of the Rings movies (yes I know they were really shot in New Zealand). Rolling hills with big territorial viewpoints, lush, green, a patchwork of woods and open fields and stone enclosures, a church steeple in the distance. Lots of walking, you can smell the wet grass and small peasant homesteads. Class divisions insult and demean in the towns but they are where all the work was. Hardy's characters, men, women, stoic, mysterious, or impulsive, all from the countryside, struggle with the ferocity of their emotions. There are two climactic romantic scenes that are as vivid and thrilling as your first or last kiss with someone you can't forget. Marriage, religion, and social conventions make people miserable in the Victorian 19th century. A longing and suffering for a love, something, unbounded by these conventions and strictures, and which always remains fleeting and beyond the grasp, if it does not lead in fact to self-destruction, suffuses all Hardy's novels, or the ones I've gotten to so far. Jude the Obscure is no exception and might be a peak. It was his last novel and he was hounded for it when it came out. For its disparaging depiction of marriage conventions and pompous religious piety. He vowed to never write another novel and only wrote poetry thereafter.