Thomas Hardy who finally unveils the body in the English novel, most particularly in Tess of the d'Urbervilles , facing at last, in relative nakedness, the presence and power of Eros, and making the next step - to D.H.Lawrence - merely inevitable. In France not only is the weight of self-censorship so much lighter (...), there is also the unavowed but nonetheless living inheritance from the eighteenth century novel, especially its masterpiece, Laclos's Les Liaisons Dangereuses , which has never been surpassed as an account of the political erotic body and its place in the network of writing and reading. Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot , p. 144.