Böcker av Thomas Hardy

This classic novel tells the story of how the poor rural couple John and Joan Durbeyfield become convinced that they are descended from the ancient family of d'Urbervilles. They encourage their innocent daughter Tess to cement a connection with the d'Urberville family, including their unprincipled son Alec, with tragic consequences.

This edition presents a critically established text based on comparisons of every revised version. Hardy placed this tale among his Novels of Character and Environment, a group which is held to include his most characteristic work.

Hardy kept notebooks on a variety of subjects which he would later use as an aide-memoire when writing his novels. This carefully edited volume explores Hardy's notebooks which should have been destroyed upon his death uncopied, as he so eloquently put it.

A richly annotated and textually reliable edition of Hardy's numerous public utterances, from formal essays and speeches to anonymous contributions to literary gossip-columns. Many are newly identified as Hardy's, and he is revealed as having been much more actively involved with contemporary issues - literary, social, political, or merely local - than previously realized.

HarperCollins is proud to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics.'The movements of his mind seemed to tend to the thought that some power was working against him.'When Henchard, an out-of-work hay-trusser gets drunk and sells his wife at a country fair, his life will never be the same. Eighteen years later, his wife and daughter return to Casterbridge to find that Henchard has become Mayor. Although he's spent most of his life attempting to repent for his actions, he remains a rash and impetuous man. Hardy portrays Henchard as a tragic hero, searching for love and acceptance from the community around him, posing the overarching question of whether we shape our own fate, or whether life deals us an inevitable hand.

Tess is an innocent young girl until the day she goes to visit her rich 'relatives', the D'Urbervilles, in hope that they might help her alleviate her own family's poverty. When she falls in love with another man, Angel Clare, Tess sees a potential escape from her past, but only if she can tell him her shameful secret...

Thomas Hardy's last novel charts the life of Jude Fawley from his parochial childhood to his death in the collegiate city of Christminster, the centre of his intellectual dreams and their failure. Initially published as a much-abridged serial, the text first appeared in its full and present form in 1895.

Hardy's classic 'pastoral tale' of wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, the faithful shepherd, the lonely widower and the dashing but faithless soldier.An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy's 'pastoral tale' of the wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene, her three suitors - the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely widower Farmer Boldwood, and the dashing but faithless Sergeant Troy - and the tragic consequences of her eventual choice remains one of the most enduring and popular English novels.

Tess, the young and lovely heroine of Hardy's classic tale, knows instinctively that the path she is choosing is the wrong one. But, a child of her times, what can she do but follow the dictates of her family?Against the lovely background of the English countryside, Thomas Hardy sets his tale of seduction and betrayal as Tess, his beautiful heroine, speeds to her destruction.Lusted after by one man, set on a pedestal by another, Thomas Hardy's lovely heroine Tess is betrayed by both. Full of images of light and shade, Tess of the d'Urbervilles makes splendid listening in a tale that is both passionate and tender.

'One of the most compassionate of all writers...you feel a kind of agony of helpless tenderness in the writer for all troubled souls' The Times Jude Fawley is a young man who longs to better himself and go to Christminster University.

'Tremendous...utterly absorbing' Independent Proud, passionate Eustacia Vye marries Clym Yeobright in the hope that he will help her escape her cramped rural existence.

Bathsheba Everdene arrives in the small village of Weatherbury and captures the heart of three very different men: Gabriel Oak, a quiet shepherd, the proud, obdurate Farmer Boldwood and dashing, unscrupulous Sergeant Troy.

When Emma Hardy died in 1912, her husband, the great novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, began to write "Poems of 1912-13," a series of elegies that are among the most moving in the English language. Although the couple had been estranged for years, after her death Hardy fell under Emma's spell again and was enthralled by her as he hadn't been in decades. He transformed his hopelessly revived love into poetry, pouring out his yearning and passionate attachment to a love forever lost."Poems of 1912-13" and the other elegies about Emma included in this volume have been read and discussed by poets and scholars for almost a century but never collected in their own book. Their accessibility, emotional power, and focus on the mysterious complexities of marriage make them of interest to a broad public. Readers will cherish this beautifully produced, illustrated volume of poetical testaments to enduring love.

This is the story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student, interwoven with his fraught relationships with two women.'

Word count 11,680

'A tale of true tragedy - a man of potential brought down by his own fatal flaw - wonderfully vivid and strong' Joanna TrollopeThe Mayor of Casterbridge is a man haunted by his past.

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.