Hardy’s tragedy has a conspicuous feature of modern novels that is the experience of “Alienation” (Qiu Weiping, 66). First of all, there is alienation between characters and the society. The society is pressing the characters into a certain social model which deprives them of their independent status, regardless of their own desires and emotions. Characters often struggle to escape from the society. Like Eustacia in the Return of the Native. Next, there is alienation between men and nature. Nature is no longer a comfortable cradle as it was in Romanticism. It becomes a huge cage for the characters. Then, there are estrangements and conflicts between man and man. Harmonious interpersonal communication seems to be broken in his work. Last, the mental state of inpidual himself is also dissociated. For example, Angel Clare in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, though he was a civil Christian, however he still abandoned Tess when he knew her misfortune. At that moment, he became a slave to the secular. All the alienations are caused by the transition of times. The new track of life exerted shocking pain to the characters and made them lost in imbalance due to the changes of times, the crash of the new into the old.

 “Hardy's work was admired by many younger writers, including D. H. Lawrence, John Cowper Powys, and Virginia Woolf.” (Wikipedia) Woolf called him “the greatest tragedy in English novels”. Webb says he is “Shakespeare in English novels”.