Page "Wessex" Paragraph 42

The English author Thomas Hardy used a fictionalised Wessex as a setting for many of his novels, adopting his friend William Barnes ' term Wessex for their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England.

Hardy's Wessex excluded Devon, Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but the city of Oxford, which he called " Christminster ", was visited as part of Wessex in Jude the Obscure.

He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as for Berkshire, which is known in the novels as " North Wessex ".