Selected Short Stories and Poems

by Thomas Hardy

The nine short stories chosen for this selection show a remarkable variety of tone and mood and a wide range of characters and location.

213 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1993

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.

Reviews

[Amy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Five stars for the short stories, two stars for my enjoyment of the poems as a whole (there are some standouts, but not many). The stories were interesting and easy to read, but the poems were just too dry for me. Admittedly the archaic language was the main barrier, which puts most of the blame on my ignorance rather than Hardy’s skill. Sorry TH my dude, it’s not your fault.

[Barun Ghosh · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a very difficult book for me to get through mainly because of the small print in the old edition that I had.