Hardy's dialogue

Mine, too -

And for crying out loud some of those notes were a little far fetched, like every time the word "road" or "path" came up it was a biblical reference? Many of them weren't even close biblical references, either.

I didn't look any of those up, nor did I look up Hamlet, Macbeth or the entire collection of Shakespearean sonnets.

My book version has a few footnotes on the page, which makes it much easier to translate the dialect (and so I don't find it so cumbersome). However, on the other hand, my book has 50 pages of additional notes at the back of the book, and I've taken to ignoring them because I'm spending so much time flipping to the back to read something as useless as the description of a tune. Don't care. It's not a non-fiction - I'm perfectly capable of using my imagination.

I just started and am maybe 15 pages or so in. So far so good, but I'm getting slowed up by Hardy's dialogue. It's frustrating and a little annoying that I have to keep scooting back to the end notes to decipher h'ere into "he is over there." That may be an exaggeration, but choose a version with footnotes, better!

Apparently the main character, Tess speaks both proper English and the Wessex dialect, so as soon as she moves to the D'Urbervilles mansion, she - I'm assuming - will being to speak in full words and not contractions. I hope.