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About Thomas Hardy
On an architectural visit to St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met his first wife, Emma Gifford. Before their marriage in 1874 he had published four novels and was earning his living as a writer. More novels followed and in 1878 the Hardys moved from Dorset to the London literary scene. But in 1885, after building his house at Max Gate near Dorchester, Hardy again returned to Dorset. He then produced most of his major novels: The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), The Pursuit of the Well-Beloved (1892) and Jude the Obscure (1895). Amidst the controversy caused by Jude the Obscure, he turned to the poetry he had been writing all his life. In the next thirty years he published over nine hundred poems and his epic drama in verse, The Dynasts.
After a long and bitter estrangement, Emma Hardy died at Max Gate in 1912. Paradoxically, the event triggered some of Hardy's finest love poetry. In 1914, however, he married Florence Dugdale, a close friend for several years. In 1910 he had been awarded the Order of Merit and was recognized, even revered, as the major literary figure of the time. He died on 11 January 1928. His ashes were buried in Westminster Abbey and his heart at Stinsford in Dorset.
Photo by Bain News Service, publisher [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons.
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Novels
Desperate Remedies [1871]
Under the Greenwood Tree [1872]
A Pair of Blue Eyes [1873]
Far from the Madding Crowd [1874]
The Hand of Ethelberta [1876]
The Return of the Native [1878]
The Trumpet-Major John Loveday [1880]
A Laodicean [1881]
Two on a Tower [1882]
The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886]
The Woodlanders [1887]
Tess of the d'Urbervilles [1891]
Jude the Obscure [1895]
The Well–Beloved [1897]
Stories
Wessex Tales [1888]: 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
A Group of Noble Dames [1891]: The first Countess of Wessex; Barbara of the House of Grebe; The Marchioness of Stonehenge; Lady Mottisfont; The Lady Icenway; Squire Petrick's Lady, Anna, Lady Baxby; The Lady Penelope; The Duchess of Hamptonshire; The Honourable Laura
Life's Little Ironies [1894]: An Imaginative Woman; The Son's Veto; For Conscience' Sake; A Tragedy of Two Ambitions; On the Western Circuit; To Please His Wife; The Fiddler of the Reels; A Few Crusted Characters
A Changed Man and Other Tales [1913]: A Changed Man; The Waiting Supper; Alicia's Diary; The Grave by the Handpost; Enter A Dragoon; A Tryst at an Ancient Earth Work; What the Shepherd Saw; A Committee-Man of 'The Terror'; The Duke's Reappearance; A Mere Interlude; The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid
Uncollected Stories: Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer; Destiny and a Blue Cloak; How I Built Myself a House; Old Mrs Chundle; Our Exploits at West Poley; The Doctor's Legend; The Spectre of the Real; The Thieves Who Couldn't Help Sneezing; The Unconquerable; An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress
And Poems
A Changed Man by Thomas Hardy.
Thomas Hardy, (born June 2, 1840, Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England-died January 11, 1928, Dorchester, Dorset), English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England.
Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason and jobbing builder, and his wife, Jemima (née Hand). He grew up in an isolated cottage on the edge of open heathland. Though he was often ill as a child, his early experience of rural life, with its seasonal rhythms and oral culture, was fundamental to much of his later writing. He spent a year at the village school at age eight and then moved on to schools in Dorchester, the nearby county town, where he received a good grounding in mathematics and Latin. In 1856 he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect, and in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birthday, he moved to London and became a draftsman in the busy office of Arthur Blomfield, a leading ecclesiastical architect. Driven back to Dorset by ill health in 1867, he worked for Hicks again and then for the Weymouth architect G.R. Crickmay.
Though architecture brought Hardy both social and economic advancement, it was only in the mid-1860s that lack of funds and declining religious faith forced him to abandon his early ambitions of a university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest. His habits of intensive private study were then redirected toward the reading of poetry and the systematic development of his own poetic skills. The verses he wrote in the 1860s would emerge in revised form in later volumes (e.g., "Neutral Tones," "Retty's Phases"), but when none of them achieved immediate publication, Hardy reluctantly turned to prose.
In 1867-68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the Lady, which was sympathetically considered by three London publishers but never published. George Meredith, as a publisher's reader, advised Hardy to write a more shapely and less opinionated novel. The result was the densely plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the contemporary "sensation" fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next novel, however, the brief and affectionately humorous idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a voice much more distinctively his own. In this book he evoked, within the simplest of marriage plots, an episode of social change (the displacement of a group of church musicians) that was a direct reflection of events involving his own father shortly before Hardy's own birth.
In March 1870 Hardy had been sent to make an architectural assessment of the lonely and dilapidated Church of St. Juliot in Cornwall. There-in romantic circumstances later poignantly recalled in prose and verse-he first met the rector's vivacious sister-in-law, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who became his wife four years later. She actively encouraged and assisted him in his literary endeavours, and his next novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), drew heavily upon the circumstances of their courtship for its wild Cornish setting and its melodramatic story of a young woman (somewhat resembling Emma Gifford) and the two men, friends become rivals, who successively pursue, misunderstand, and fail her.
- Desperate Remedies
- Under the Greenwood Tree
- A Pair of Blue Eyes
- Far From the Madding Crowd
- The Hand of Ethelberta
- The Return of the Native
- The Trumpet-Major
- A Laodicean
- Two on a Tower
- The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid
- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- The Woodlanders
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- Jude the Obscure
- The Well–Beloved
Young farm worker Michael Henchard arrives in Casterbridge, Wessex, with his wife and child, looking for a job. Instead, he finds rum. At the town fair, Henchard quarrels with his wife and drunkenly auctions her and his daughter to the assembled crowd. He sells his family to a sailor for five guineas, a monstrous crime that marks him for a lifetime of guilt and pain.
The next morning, Henchard swears off drink. Eighteen years later, he is the wealthy—and sober—mayor of Casterbridge, his terrible secret buried deep in the past. But when Henchard falls in love with a young woman on a trip to the island of Jersey, his inability to marry her threatens to destroy her reputation. The sudden return of his wife and daughter presents Henchard with a chance to finally make things right—or doom himself forever.
This ebook has been professionally proofread to ensure accuracy and readability on all devices.
The first table of contents (at the very beginning of the ebook) lists the titles of all novels included in this volume. By clicking on one of those titles you will be redirected to the beginning of that work, where you'll find a new TOC that lists all the chapters and sub-chapters of that specific work.
Here you will find the complete novels of Thomas Hardy in the chronological order of their original publication:
Under the Greenwood Tree
A Pair of Blue Eyes
Far From the Madding Crowd
The Mayor of Casterbridge
Tess of the d'Urbervilles
The Woodlanders
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Jude the Obscure
These are a few of his most famous books that are read daily and are in great demand for the magnificence of their content that has not disappeared to this day.
The novel is the first to be set in Thomas Hardy's Wessex in rural southwest England. It deals in themes of love, honour and betrayal, against a backdrop of the seemingly idyllic, but often harsh, realities of a farming community in Victorian England. It describes the life and relationships of Bathsheba Everdene with her lonely neighbour William Boldwood, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, and the thriftless soldier Sergeant Troy.
On publication, critical notices were plentiful and mostly positive. Hardy revised the text extensively for the 1895 edition and made further changes for the 1901 edition.
In 2003, the novel was listed at number 48 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
In 2007, the book finished 10th on the Guardian's list of greatest love stories of all time.
The novel has been dramatised several times, notably in the Oscar-nominated 1967 film directed by John Schlesinger.
Like Charles Dickens, Hardy was highly critical of Victorian society. While Dickens’ focus was mostly urban society, Hardy focused mostly on the declining rural societies of Victorian England.
The Collection
• Far From the Madding Crowd
• The Return of The Native
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Jude the Obscure
Free audiobooks
• Far From the Madding Crowd
• The Return of The Native
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Jude the Obscure
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