In this tale of star-crossed love, Hardy sets the emotional lives of his two lovers against the background of the stellar universe. The unhappily married Lady Constantine breaks all the rules of social decorum when she falls in love with Swithin St. Cleeve, an astronomer who is ten years her junior. Her husband's death leaves the lovers free to marry, but the discovery of a legacy forces them apart. This is Hardy's most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide and the fullest expression of his fascination with science and astronomy.
For more than seventy...

Volumes IV and V of the Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Hardy, which complete the edition, contain all of his dramatic writing in verse. Hardy was Hardy was interested in dramatic verse all his adult life; before he wrote his first novel he considered writing plays in blank verse, and during the thirty years of his novel-writing career he entered in his notebooks many schemes for a vast poetic drama of England's wars with Napoleon. But it was not until after he had turned from fiction to poetry, in the 1890s, that he actually began to work on a poetic drama. The Dynasts was written between...

Both major novelist and major poet, with a distinctive off-beat and intensel

Interrogates a society caught between tradition and modernity, the archaic and what the narrator calls the irrepressible New

A Hardcover Classics edition of Thomas Hardy's impassioned novel of courtship in rural life, soon to be a movie starring Carey Mulligan and Michael Sheen
In Thomas Hardy's first major literary success, independent and spirited Bathsheba Everdene has come to Weatherbury to take up her position as a farmer on the largest estate in the area. Her bold presence draws three very different suitors: the gentleman-farmer Boldwood, the soldier-seducer Sergeant Troy, and the devoted shepherd Gabriel Oak. Each, in contrasting ways, unsettles her decisions and complicates her life, and tragedy...

For farmers, life in Great Britain in the 1800s was a never ending struggle. For a young woman who recently inherited a successful sheep farm, it could be even more difficult. Bathsheba Everdene, sure of herself and her ability finds that this was just one of the challenges she faced. Being beautiful, admired and desired, while working side-by-side with her faithful field workers complicates her life as she proves her dedication to a successful farm, and finds love and contentment.