Thomas Hardy's pastoral novel follows the romantic entanglements of a rural English choir in 19th-century Wessex, weaving together courtship, community traditions, and the changing countryside. The fiction centers on Dick Dewy's pursuit of the new schoolmistress Fancy Day amid village gossip and seasonal celebrations.
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall. And winter, which modifies the note of such trees as shed their leaves, does not destroy its individuality. On a cold and starry Christmas-eve within living memory a man was passing up a lane towards Mellstock Cross in the darkness of a plantation that whispered thus distinctively to his intelligence. All the evidences of his nature were those afforded by the spirit of his footsteps, which succeeded each other lightly and quickly, and by the liveliness of his voice as he sang in a rural cadence: “With the rose and the lily And the daffodowndilly, The lads and the lasses a-shee…Continue reading →
A Victorian novelist and poet who captured rural English life with unflinching realism, this master storyteller (1840-1928) created tragic tales of individuals crushed by social conventions and fate. His novels like Tess of the d'Urbervilles and The Mayor of Casterbridge revealed the harsh realities beneath idealized country living, influencing modern literature's psychological depth. All works by Thomas Hardy →
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