[Gutenberg 4043] • The Dynasts: An Epic-Drama of the War with Napoleon

British novelist, short story writer, and poet of the naturalist movement. He captured the epoch just before the railways and the industrial revolution changed the English countryside. His works are pessimistic and bitterly ironic, and his writing is rough but capable of immense power.

In 1873 A Pair of Blue Eyes, a story drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published under his own name.

In Far from the Madding Crowd [1874], his next (and first important) novel, Hardy introduced Wessex, the "partly-real, partly-dream" county named after the Anglo-Saxon kingdom that existed in the area. The landscape was modelled on the real counties of Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire, with fictional places based on real locations.

Over the next twenty-five years Hardy produced ten more novels.

The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native [1878]. In 1885, they moved for a last time, to Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and built by his brother. There he wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge [1886], The Woodlanders [1887], and Tess of the d'Urbervilles [1891], the latter which attracted criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was initially refused publication. Jude the Obscure, published in 1895, was met with even stronger negative outcries by the Victorian public for its frank treatment of sex.

Table of Contents

Tess of the d'Urbervilles

Far From the Madding Crowd

The Return of the Native

A Pair of Blue Eyes

The Mayor of Casterbridge

Life's Little Ironies - A set of tales with some colloquial sketches entitled A Few Crusted Characters

Desperate Remedies

The Dynasts - An Epic-Drama Of The War With Napoleon, In Three Parts, Nineteen Acts, And One Hundred And Thirty Scenes

A Group of Noble Dames

Jude the Obscure