Character Analysis
Hardy's most fully realized creation — a woman of unusual intelligence, physical beauty, emotional depth, and moral seriousness who is destroyed not by her own flaws but by the accumulated weight of Victorian systems operating against her. Her characteristic quality is endurance: she endures Alec, she endures Angel's abandonment, she endures Flintcomb-Ash, she endures the loss of her family's home. Her one act of violence — murdering Alec — is the only moment the novel gives her agency over her own life, and it ends that life. Hardy does not soften this. He asks the reader to look at it clearly.
Shifts between standard English (educated by sixth-standard schooling) and dialect depending on audience. Around Angel she is grammatically careful; among her family she relaxes into Blackmoor speech.