Thomas Hardy was part of the English naturalist movement. He wrote short stories, novels, and poetry. Life's Little Ironies

The Well-Beloved is a story of one man's obsessive search for the perfect woman. Jocelyn Pierston is a sculptor. All his life he has been haunted by an image of beauty - the 'well-beloved' - which he yearns for both as an artist and as a lover. Glimpses of her are fleeting, as different women seem to embody this ideal for a time; Pierston grasps but cannot hold his well-beloved. His lifelong search leads to his courtship of three generations of women on the Isle of Slingers (an evocative rendering of the real-life English island of Portland). The last of Thomas Hardy's novels to be published,...

Thomas Hardy pays tribute to the triumphs and tribulations of patrician Englishwomen in his collection of short stories, A Group of Noble Dames. Around the fire at an inn, sheltering from a storm, the members of the Wessex Field and Antiquarian Club are each entreated to tell a story. The men all tell tales of women, the 'Noble Dames' of the title, from the Countess of Wessex to the Duchess of Hamptonshire. The lives of these fictional dames are imagined by Hardy based on clues from real-life genealogies and archival family records. Inventive and detailed, these stories confirm why Hardy is...

Cruelly seduced by her relative, the cynical Alec D'Urberville, betrayed by the moral Angel Clare and haunted by her guilt and shame, Tess becomes Hardy's indictment of all the crimes and hyprocrisies of 19th-century England.

Thomas Hardy was part of the English naturalist movement. He wrote short stories, novels, and poetry. In The Mayor of Casterbridge a hay-tresser in England in 1886 gets drunk at a fair and sells his family to a sailor. Eighteen years later, when the man has become the respected mayor of Casterbridge, his wife returns, and with her comes renewed problems and old vices

Thomas Hardy was part of the English naturalist movement. He wrote short stories, novels, and poetry. Stories in this collection include A Changed Man -- The Waiting Supper -- Alicia's Diary -- The Grave by the Handpost -- Enter a Dragoon -- A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork -- What the Shepherd Saw -- A Committee Man of 'The Terror' -- Master John Horseleigh, Knight -- The Duke's Reappearance -- A Mere Interlude - and The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid.

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...

Thomas Hardy was part of the English naturalist movement. He wrote short stories, novels, and poetry. In The Woodlanders romance and social class become entangled in nineteenth-century England. Little Hintock is a small woodland village. Giles Winterborne wants to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace. Grace's father has given Grace a good education and no longer feels Giles is suitable for his daughter. When Edred Fitzpiers, a young doctor, comes to town, Grace's father tries to make Grace forget about Giles. Grace marries the doctor and soon things go wrong. The doctor has an affair with a...

Poems of 1912 13 and the other elegies about Emma included in this volume have been read and discussed by poets and scholars for almost a century but never collected in their own book. Their accessibility, emotional power, and focus on the mysterious complexities of marriage make them of interest to a broad public. Readers will cherish this beautifully produced, illustrated volume of poetical testaments to enduring love. "