Thomas Hardy

This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...

Thomas Hardy's first masterpiece, The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a scene of such heartlessness and cruelty that it still shocks readers today. A poor workman named Michael Henchard, in a fit of drunken rage, sells his wife and baby daughter to a stranger at a country fair. Stricken with remorse, Henchard forswears alcohol and works hard to become a prosperous businessman and the respected mayor of Casterbridge. But he cannot erase his past....

This is a tragic tale of unconsummated passion and rivalry in love. A stonemason working on a church falls in love and elopes with the vicar's daughter. However, their vacillations lead to tragedy. The text is accompanied by a critical introduction.

A young woman finds herself the victim of fate and of forces beyond her control in nineteenth-century England.

A young woman, Cytherea Graye, is forced by poverty to accept a post as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe, the woman whom her father had loved but had been unable to marry. Cytherea loves a young architect, Edward Springrove, but Miss Adclyffe's machinations, the discovery that Edward is already engaged to a woman whom he does not love, and the urgent need to support a sick brother drive Cytherea to accept the hand of Aeneas Manston, Miss...

The first and best piece, "The Three Strangers," pulls out all the stops: a violent storm on the downs, three mysterious strangers who seek shelter in a shepherd's cabin where a rousing christening party is in progress, and the booming of a cannon to announce the escape of a prisoner nearby. In other stories (e.g., "Fellow Townsmen") the characters seem wooden, with plots turning too much on coincidence. Woven through all, however, are lively descriptions...

"Did it never strike your mind that what every woman says, some women may feel?" Tess of the d'Ubervilles is a heartbreaking tale of a woman going to every length to try and do what is right, only to have fate tease her at each turn.

In the sphere of poets like Swift, Meredith and Kipling, Thomas Hardy is today becoming recognized as one of the greatest English poets of this century. As a young man with interests in journalism, art, and architecture, Hardy achieved greatness in the fiction genre early on, writing novels for a living until his mid-fifties. He then abandoned fiction entirely in order to devote himself to his true passion-poetry. This ample selection of poems demonstrates...

Paula Power inherits a medieval castle from her industrialist father who has purchased it from the aristocratic De Stancy family. She employs two architects, one local and one, George Somerset, newly qualified from London. Somerset represents modernity in the novel. The changing of the old order in country manors and mansions may be slow or sudden, may have many issues romantic or otherwise, its romantic issues being not necessarily restricted to...

This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other places, is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of the time.