Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including The Three Strangers, The Withered Arm and The Distracted Preacher, deal with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy's work, including marriage, class, revenge and disappointed love. Many of the tales have a supernatural tinge, and all[...]

Desperate Remedies

One in a new series of fiction titles, each of them written by a master storyteller. Great writing, great entertainment and exceptional value.[...]

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Thomas Hardy was a realist novelist and poet who strove to highlight the pitfalls of Victorian society, with especial regard to the decline of the rural commun[...]

Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy's Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love. It tells of the dashing Sergeant Troy who[...]

Under the Greenwood Tree is Hardy's most bright, confident and optimistic novel. This delightful portrayal of a picturesque rural society, tinged with gentle humour and quiet irony, established Hardy as a writer. However, the novel is not merely a charming rural idyll. The double-plot, in which the [...]

Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immu[...]

Set in the bleak, magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Hardy's early work, Tess's cruel story reveals circumstances slowly closing in on her as she attempts to grasp a few moments of happiness with her lover. Patricia Ingham is the author of Thomas Hardy: A Feminist Reading.[...]

Wild passion leads to tragedy as love is perverted by marriage. But the concerns of mortals are belittled by the sombre, immemorial presence of Egdon Heath, perhaps Hardy's finest evocation of his native landscape. The text is accompanied by a critical introduction.[...]

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Hardy's powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the backdrop of a close-knit Dorset town.[...]

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman or just Tess is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialized version, published by the British illustrated newspaper, The Graphic. It is Hardy's penultimate novel, followed by Jude the Obscure. Though now considered a great class[...]