Books by Thomas Hardy

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.

Word count 6,490

Hardy's first published work, Desperate Remedies moves the sensation novel into new territory. The compelling story and the machinations of the evil Aeneas Manston also raise the great questions underlying Hardy's major novels, and this edition shows for the first time that the sensation genre was always Hardy's natural medium. Based on first edition text, and includes later prefaces and the Wessex Poems 'dissolved' into prose.

This award-winning graded readers series is full of original fiction, adapted fiction and factbooks especially written for teenagers.

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, presents manuscript readings which have never before appeared in print. The stories include The Three Strangers; A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four; The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion; The Withered Arm; Fellow-Townsmen; Interlopers at the Knap; The Distracted Preacher

Thomas Hardy is among the best loved of the great English poets. The new selection of his work made by Samuel Hynes represents all of Hardy's verse collections and gives generous samples from his finest.

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 novels the events and social forces that made him the writer he was. Elfride's dilemma mirrors the difficult decision Hardy himself had to make with this novel: to pursue the profession of architecture, where he was established, or literature, where he had yet to make his name. This updated edition contains a new introduction, bibliography, and chronology.

This notebook dates from the mid-1860s, and preserves evidence of the studies of other writers, and the self-assigned exercises in vocabulary-building and poetic techniques by which Hardy so deliberately sought to make himself into a poet at the very beginning of his literary career.

Word count 5,735

Peter Widdowson's major new selection of Hardy's poetry offers the student a challenging assessment of his poetic achievement by juxtaposing Hardy's best known poems with some of his least known.

A scholarly edition of those stories of Thomas Hardy's which were excluded from the collective volumes published during his lifetime, as well as his collaborative stories. Each story appears with a textual apparatus, explanatory annotation and details of its publishing history.

''The woman is no good to me. Who''ll have her?''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. Eighteen years later Susan and her daughter seek him out, only to discover that he has become the most prominent man in Casterbridge. Henchard attempts to make amends for his youthful misdeeds but his unchanged impulsiveness clouds his relationships in love as well as his fortunes in business. Although Henchard is fated to be a modern-day tragic hero, unable tosurvive in the new commercial world, his story is also a journey towards love.This edition is the only critically established text of the novel, based on a comprehensive study of the manuscript and Hardy''s extensive revisions. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World''s Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford''s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Jude Fawley's ambitions to go to university are thwarted by class prejudice and his entrapment in a loveless marriage. His doomed love affair with his unconventional cousin has tragic consequences. Hardy's last, and most controversial novel, this revised edition has the first truly critical text, a new chronology and bibliography, and substantially revised notes.

Far from the Madding Crowd was the first of Hardy's novels to give the name of Wessex to the landscape of the south-west of England, and the first to gain him widespread popularity. The story of the wooing of Bathsheba Everdene by three suitors is here presented in a critical text with a new introduction, bibliography and chronology.

Word count 24,490 Bestseller

This Norton Critical Edition is based on the 1912 Wessex edition, emended to correct errors which have crept into the text from the manuscript onward.

This Second Edition reprints the text of the authoritative 1912 Macmillan Wessex Edition.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born in Dorset. He left school at sixteen to work as an apprentice for an architect who specialized in church restoration. He made his reputation as a novelist, and it wasn't until after the publication of his last novel, The Well-beloved, in 1897, that he dedicated himself to writing poetry.

Since the true circumstances of its composition have been known The Early Life and Later Years of Thomas Hardy, published over the name of Florence Emily Hardy, has frequently been referred to as Hardy's autobiography.

The text of this edition is based on the Wessex Edition of 1912, which was revised and corrected by the author.

Thomas Hardy has long been critically constructed as 'poet of Wessex' and 'novelist of Character and Environment'. This volume offers to deconstruct such a mythic 'Hardy' in selecting contemporary critical essays which re-present Tess from very different critical perspectives.

The daughter of a wealthy railway magnate, Paula Power inherits De Stancy Castle, an ancient castle in need of modernization. She commissions George Somerset, a young architect, to undertake the work. Somerset falls in love with Paula but she, the Laodicean of the title, is torn between his admiration and that of Captain De Stancy, whose old-world romanticism contrasts with Somerset's forward-looking attitude. Paula's vacillation, however, is not only romantic. Her ambiguity regarding religion, politics and social progress is a reflection of the author's own. This new Penguin Classics edition of Hardy's text contains an introduction and notes that illuminate and clarify these themes, and draws parallels between the text and the author's life and views.

Adventuress and opportunist, Ethelberta reinvents herself to disguise her humble origins, launching a brilliant career as a society poet in London with her family acting incognito as her servants. Turning the male-dominated literary world to her advantage, she happily exploits the attentions of four very different suitors. Will she bestow her hand upon the richest of them, or on the man she loves? Ethelberta Petherwin, alias Berta Chickerel, moves with easy grace between her multiple identities, cleverly managing a tissue of lies to aid her meteoric rise. In The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), Hardy drew on conventions of popular romances, illustrated weeklies, plays, fashion plates and even his wife's diary in this comic story of a woman in control of her destiny.

Hardy's two versions of a strange story set in the weird landscape of Portland. The central figure is a man obsessed both with the search for his ideal woman and with sculpting the perfect figure of Aphrodite.

Part of a collection of volumes containing all of Hardy's poetic works, this book contains, in addition to the major poem known as "The Dynasts", Hardy's versions of two folk-pieces: the "Mummers' Play of Saint George" and the operetta "O'Jan, O'Jan, O'Jan" (here published for the first time).