Thomas Hardy: 25 Novels - Far From The Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure and much more..

by Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth.[1] He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin.[2] Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read. included 13 Novels FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES JUDE THE OBSCURE DESPERATE REMEDIES A PAIR OF BLUE EYES UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE THE WOODLANDERS A A STORY OF TO-DAY THE TRUMPET-MAJOR JOHN LOVEDAY THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA TWO ON A TOWER A dozen minor novels A CHANGED MAN AND OTHER TALES • Thomas Hardy-Biography

Genres: Classics, Fiction

Kindle Edition

First published April 22, 2015

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 Beck]

I finished Far from the Madding Crowd and am now into Return of the Native. Thomas Hardy has always been one of my all-time favorite authors.

[Critical Sandwich]

I sometimes do "randomizer pick" when choosing my next read, and I DON'T have classics books by big authors on goodreads TBR (cuz otherwise my TBR would be ~200 books higher), so I put a few of these "Complete Works" onto TBR so they'd have a chance to be chosen by randomizer, but I'd still have the freedom to choose whatever work.