Showing results by author "Thomas Hardy" in All Categories

A glittering collection of some of the world's finest short stories.

Set on the Isle of Slingers, this novel follows the exploits of Jocelyn Pierston, a sculptor who falls in love successively with three generations of island women, seeking female perfection, just as he strives to realise the ideal woman in stone.

One of the most popular of Hardy’s novels, this charming pastoral idyll is a lightly humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. Drawn from Hardy’s childhood memories, it represents, he said, “a true picture at first hand of the personages, ways, and customs which were common in the villages.”

Under the Greenwood Tree is an affectionate and youthful portrait of a world Hardy knew well - village life in 'Wessex' - in which a romantic tale is set against changing circumstances. The traditional feature of local music making performed by the village band and choir is challenged by the modern innovation of organ and organist providing music in the church.

The Woodlanders is vintage Hardy. The story revolves around the young woman Grace Melbury, who returns to the leafy world of Little Hintock and soon finds herself at the center of a number of tragic events. In penetrating, incisive and beautiful prose, Hardy tells a moving tale of unrequited love as fate and the constraints of society thwart the happiness of our heroine.

Eustacia Vye's great desire in life was to be loved to madness, and in this, one of Thomas Hardy's best-loved novels, one of his most superb female characters conducts her wild and lethal campaign against her rival - the innocent, rather conventional Thomas - against the backdrop of Egdon Heath, the equally wild and lethal Dorset moorland on which Hardy grew up.

Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston. Desperate Remedies contains sensational ingredients of blackmail, murder and romance, but with its insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy’s future genius.

Against the larger-than-life backdrop of England's conflict with Napoleon, young Anne Garland is courted by three suitors: the trumpet-major John Loveday, his sailor-brother Bob, and Festus Derriman of the yeomanry cavalry. For Hardy, the loves and sorrows of ordinary characters are as much the material of history as any record of emperors and generals.

Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow, A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new - from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s "Christmas in India", from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to Laurie Lee’s "Cider with Rosie".

In the midst of bombs and bullets, trenches and trauma, the soldiers of World War I, and those observing the horrors taking place from home, took pen to paper to record their experiences in verse. These poems - considered the greatest written during WWI and some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century - show the horror of war but also shine a light on the strength of human courage, bravery, and virtue.

Subtitled 'A Story of To-day', A Laodicean occupies a unique place in the Thomas Hardy canon. Departing from pre-industrial Wessex, Hardy brings his themes of social constraint, fate, chance and miscommunication to the very modern world of the 1880s - complete with falsified telegraphs, fake photographs, and perilous train tracks. The story follows the life of Paula Power, heiress of her late father's railroad fortune and the new owner of the medieval Castle Stancy. With the castle in need of restoration, Paula employs architect George Somerset, who soon falls in love with her.

Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason - his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and the church, the outcasts find themselves on the brink of despair.

Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice.

Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by Samuel West. 'As you got older, ... you were seized with a sort of shuddering, he perceived. All around you there seemed to be...

The British Classics Collection – Volume 2 steps into the grand world of 18th, 19th, and 20th-century British literature to create a compelling anthology featuring iconic works that span time and genres. From the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland to the mystery of The Woman in White, the philosophical insights of The Waste Land and the unforgettable detective stories of Sherlock Holme, this volume offers a rich variety of British literary masterpieces.

Dance with a lobster, telephone an elephant or knock on a moonlit door - this collection includes magical, macabre, dramatic, funny, bizarre, absurd, delightful, moving and charming poems by Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc, Kenneth Grahame and many others. Readers such as Anton Lesser, Simon Russell-Beale and Timothy West bring the lines beautifully to life and make this an ideal introduction to some of the best-loved children's poetry.

Drunk on rum at a country fair, Henchard sells his wife to a sailor for five guineas. Unable to find them and overcome with guilt and remorse he vows to be teetotal for 21 years. Many years later his wife seeks him out in Casterbridge, where he has gained both wealth and the well respected position of mayor.

This is a diverting delight, a window on romance in literature. There are high lovers and low lovers, tragic lovers, comic lovers, and lovers who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing at all and certainly not then and there. There is even Fanny Hill trying not to discover what physical love is about when set upon by an old roué who has paid for the privilege. Though of special interest for lovers and their special lover’s day of St. Valentine, it is an amusing and sometimes surprising collection.

Set against the backdrop of peaceful southwest England, where Thomas Hardy spent much of his youth, The Mayor of Casterbridge captures the author's unique genius for depicting the absurdity underlying much of the sorrow and humor in our lives. Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife, Susan, and baby daughter.

Many giants of literature originate from the shores of the emerald isles: Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, the Brontes, and Austen, to which most people would willingly add the name Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and The Mayor of Casterbridge are but three of his literary masterpieces. But let us go further and add to his canon his poems....