In this, his first collection of short stories, Hardy sought to record the legends, superstitions, local customs, and lore of a Wessex that was rapidly passing out of memory. But these tales also portray the social and economic stresses of 1880s Dorset, and reveal Hardy's growing scepticism about the possibility of achieving personal and sexual satisfaction in the modern world. By turns humorous, ironic, macabre, and elegiac, these seven stories show the range of Hardy's story-telling genius.
The critically established text, the first to be based on detailed study of all revised texts,...

Love and the erratic heart are at the center of Hardy's "woodland story." Set in the beautiful Blackmoor Vale, The Woodlanders concerns the fortunes of Giles Winterborne, whose love for the well-to-do Grace Melbury is challenged by the arrival of the dashing and dissolute doctor, Edred Fitzpiers. When the mysterious Felice Charmond further complicates the romantic entanglements, marital choice and class mobility become inextricably linked. Hardy's powerful novel depicts individuals in thrall to desire and the natural law that motivates them.
This is the only critical edition of the novel,...

Hardy's first published work, Desperate Remedies moves the sensation novel into new territory. The anti-hero, Aeneas Manston, as physically alluring as he is evil, even fascinates the innocent Cytherea, though she is in love with another man. When he cannot seduce her, Manston resorts to deception, blackmail, bigamy, murder, and rape. Yet this compelling story also raises the great questions underlying Hardy's major novels, which relate to the injustice of the class system, the treatment of women, probability and causality. This edition shows for the first time that the sensation novel was...

"Miss Fancy Day; as neat a little figure of fun as ever I see, and just husband-high."
One of the most popular of Hardy's novels, Under the Greenwood Tree is a delightful and humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. The story delicately balances the concerns of the Mellstock parish choir with a romance between the village schoolmistress and a member of the choir. Hardy thought well enough of the tale to place it among his Novels of Character and Environment, a group with includes his most characteristic work.
This freshly reset second edition features a new...

Thomas Hardy's first love was always poetry. It was not until 1898, when he was fifty-eight years old, having already established his reputation with fourteen novels and over forty short stories, that his first book of poetry, Wessex Poems was published. For the final thirty years of his life he abandoned fiction and devoted himself entirely to poetry. It is a tribute to his remarkable powers of creativity that he is now not only regarded as one of the most important English novelists but is also recognised as a poet of major stature and ever increasing popularity. The Complete Poems, edited...

The resulting text includes revisions by Hardy which have never appeared before in a modern edition The novel is fully annotated and is accompanied by Hardy's map of Wessex and a simplified map of the landscape ofFar from the Madding Crowd. "Textual Notes" include a list of emendations, examples of variant readings from the manuscript to the Wessex edition, and a discussion of the choice of copy text The textual history of the novel is traced in extracts from studies by Richard Little Purdy and Simon Gatrell "Backgrounds" includes substantial extracts from Hardy's correspondence with...

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

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Full of analysis and interpretation, historical background, discussions and commentaries, York Notes will help you get right to the heart of the text you're studying, whether it's poetry, a play or a novel.

This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.'