I remember a conversation in about 1978 with a great aunt of mine up in Connecticut. She read voraciously, and in the last years of her life mostly it was Book of the Month Club stuff that was delivered to the house. I was up there visiting her one weekend and was reading one of Hardy's novels. She asked what I was reading, and I told her. She thought about it a minute and said "He's that English fellow, isn't he?" as if he was still around and writing. And then I realized that since she was born in 1890, he would have been alive still when she was a young adult. I was looking at his works as classics and Hardy a relic of another period, and she saw him as a contemporary.

It does interesting things to what you're reading when you have a little encounter like that.

SRS