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.

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.

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.

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 RETURN OF THE NATIVE was written towards the beginning of Hardy's career as a novelist and can be considered one of his most representative works. In this novel, Hardy's tragic vision is powerfully and narrowly focussed on Egdon Heath and the men and women who live on it. Set against the backdrop of the Heath and the impersonal and eternal forces it represents, the fates of Eustacia Vye, Diggory Venn, Clym Yeobright - the returning 'native' - and others are inexorably played out.

A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.

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).