In Desperate Remedies 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 Adclyffe's illegitimate son, whose first wife is believed to have perished in a fire; however, their marriage is almost...

Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published anonymously in 1872. It was Hardy's second published novel, the last to be printed without his name, and the first of his great series of Wessex novels. Whilst Hardy originally thought of simply calling it The Mellstock Quire, he settled on a title taken from a song in Shakespeare's As You Like It (Act II, Scene V).The plot concerns the activities of a group of church musicians, the Mellstock parish choir, one of whom, Dick Dewy, becomes romantically entangled with a comely new school...

Far from the Madding Crowd is a novel by 19th century English novelist Thomas Hardy, published in 1874. The title is apt, as the life of the book's heroine, Bathsheba Everdene, living in the quiet rural village of Weatherbury is indeed disrupted by the "madding crowd." After shunning the first man to love her, the shepherd Gabriel Oak, she is courted by two others: the lonely and repressed farmer Boldwood, and the charming but faithless Sergeant Troy. The role of fate is clearly established, with each twist and turn in the book being more luck than the choice of one of the characters. The...

The Return of the Native is Thomas Hardy's sixth published novel. It first appeared in the serial Belgravia, a publication known for its sensationalism, and was presented in twelve monthly instalments from January to December of 1878. Due to the novel's controversial themes, Hardy had some difficulty finding a publisher; reviews, however, though somewhat mixed, were generally positive. In the twentieth century, Return of the Native became one of Hardy's most popular novels

The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), subtitled "The Life and Death of a Man of Character," is a novel by British author Thomas Hardy. It is set in the fictional town of Casterbridge (based on the town of Dorchester in Dorset). The book is one of Hardy's Wessex novels, all set in a fictional rural England. Hardy began writing the book in 1884 and wrote the last page on 17 April 1885. Within the book, he writes that the events took place "before the nineteenth century had reached one-third of its span." Literary critic Dale Kramer sees it as being set somewhat later-in the late 1840s,...

The Woodlanders is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published in 1887. The story takes place in a small woodland village called Little Hintock, and concerns the efforts of an honest woodsman, Giles Winterbourne, to marry his childhood sweetheart, Grace Melbury. It is not considered one of Hardy's best novels, yet it is still read with interest and as a comparison with his better respected novels. The Woodlanders marks the beginnings of controversy for Hardy's novels. At this point in his career he was established enough as a writer to take risks, especially in the areas of sex, sexual attraction,...

Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented is a novel by Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891 and in book form in 1892. Though now considered a major nineteenth-century English novel and possibly Hardy's fictional masterpiece, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.The novel is set in impoverished rural England, Thomas Hardy's fictional Wessex, during the Long...

Jude the Obscure is the last of Thomas Hardy's novels, begun as a magazine serial and first published in book form in 1895. The book was burnt publicly by the Bishop of Exeter in that same year. Its hero Jude Fawley is a lower-class young man who dreams of becoming a scholar. The two other main characters are his earthy wife, Arabella, and his intellectual cousin, Sue. Themes include class, scholarship, religion, marriage, and the modernisation of thought and society.