Poetry is a fascinating use of language. With almost a million words at its command it is not surprising that these Isles have produced some of the most beautiful, moving and descriptive verse through the centuries. In this series we look at each calendar month through the eyes and minds of our most gifted poets to bring you a guide to the days within each. This volume of Poetry is all about April - the fourth month of the year in our Gregorian calendar heralding Spring in earnest and of course April Showers and perhaps other unsettled weather. For our poets including Wilfred Owen, Thomas...

One evening of late summer, before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span, a young man and woman, the latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of Weydon-Priors, in Upper Wessex, on foot. They were plainly but not ill clad, though the thick hoar of dust which had accumulated on their shoes and garments from an obviously long journey lent a disadvantageous shabbiness to their appearance just now.

The schoolmaster was leaving the village, and everybody seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small white tilted cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his destination, about twenty miles off, such a vehicle proving of quite sufficient size for the departing teacher's effects. For the schoolhouse had been partly furnished by the managers, and the only cumbersome article possessed by the master, in addition to the packing-case of books, was a cottage piano that he had bought at an auction during the year in which he thought of learning instrumental music. But the...

When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.

Elfride Swancourt is the daughter of the Rector of Endelstow, a remote sea-swept parish in Corwall based on St Juliot, where Hardy began A Pair of Blue Eyes during the beginning of his courtship of his first wife, Emma. Blue-eyed and high-spirited, Elfride has little experience of the world beyond, and becomes entangled with two men: the boyish architect, Stephen Smith, and the older literary man, Henry Knight. The former friends become rivals, and Elfride faces an agonizing choice. Written at a crucial time in Hardy's life, A Pair of Blue Eyes expresses more directly than any of his novels...

When Bathsheba Everdene inherits a farm from her uncle, no-one expects her to run it alone. But our spirited young heroine will not be deterred and eagerly takes up the gauntlet.

She rises impressively to the challenges of sheep farming, but the trials of the heart are harder to overcome. Caught between a pair of suitors - the kind and dependable shepherd Gabriel Oak and the prosperous eligible bachelor William Boldwood, her choice seems hard enough. Then the dashing Sergeant Troy appears over the horizon, with a swagger in his step and a dangerous secret in his past. Who will she choose?

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), the Victorian novelist, poet, and short-story author, wrote of the struggles and unhappiness caused by the constraints of social convention, particularly in relation to religion, class, education, and marriage. Hardy's first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), a piece of sensation fiction that encompasses illegitimacy, murder, blackmail, impersonation, and bigamy, was originally published anonymously. Written while, in Hardy's own words, he was "feeling his way to a method," it nonetheless contains early examples of the kinds of extreme situations and...

Hardy's second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), the first of his great series of Wessex novels, was originally published anonymously. As part of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, this edition of the novel provides readers with an authoritative and accurate text of the novel; moreover it gives access to every revision that Hardy made, and to notations of all the errors introduced by printers' compositors. The annotated text is surrounded by an introduction that gives a very full account of the genesis, the writing and the publishing history of...

Thomas Hardy's eleventh published novel, The Woodlanders, is a story of wide appeal. It considers themes of marriage and social class, while revealing the author's profound knowledge of nature and country life. The authoritative text of this critical edition is supported by a comprehensive introduction, chronology and accompanying textual apparatus.