The Complete Novels

The Greatest Writers of All Time #41

by Thomas Hardy

This book contains the complete novels of Thomas Hardy in the chronological order of their original publication.

- Desperate Remedies
- Under the Greenwood Tree
- A Pair of Blue Eyes
- Far From the Madding Crowd
- The Hand of Ethelberta
- Return of the Native
- The Trumpet-Major
- A Laodicean
- Two on a Tower
- The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid
- The Mayor of Casterbridge
- The Woodlanders
- Tess of the D’Urbervilles
- Jude the Obscure
- The Well–Beloved

Genres: Classics, Fiction, Literature, Historical Fiction

Kindle Edition

First published July 9, 2014

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

[skip thurnauer · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wanted to like Jude Fawley, the central character of the novel and did. Jude was a poor country bumpkin who aspired to an education and degree from Christminster, the Oxford-like university he could spy from the hilltops of his village miles away. On his own, he studies Greek and Latin at night while apprenticing as a stone mason. Jude's goals are the clergy or an academic profession. The wily and seductive country maiden Arabella tricks Jude into marriage by claiming she is pregnant. After living together as husband and wife for a short while, Arabella abandons the marriage and England for Australia. This enables Jude to finally move to Christminster where he works as a mason and resumes his independent studies of the classics. Jude's elderly aunt mentions a young niece, Sue Bridehead, who lives in Christminster, but cautions Jude about seeing her because of bad blood between the 2 lines of the family. Further, the aunt says Jude's and Sue's families have not fared well in marriage, a harbinger to later developments. Despite the warning, Jude and Sue fall in love, but their road to a happy enduring relationship is complicated over the approximate decade of their relationship by Sue's marriage to Phillotson, Jude's childhood teacher and the inspiration for an academic profession, and the return of Arrabella from Australia. Over the course of the story, Jude abandons his dreams of academia and the church, while Sue transforms from a skeptic to a true believer. I wanted a "happy ever after" conclusion for Jude and Sue, but it was not to be had. Hardy presents the Christchurch education as the dominion of the elite and wealthy, but hints at the end that a change may be coming. The role of organized religion and the institution of marriage are both examined and found wanting, especially when aligned against the true love between Jude and Sue. Having recently visited Oxford and the "Wessex" countryside, I could see the university as well as the small towns that populate Hardy's novel.

[simon t ball · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great.

Took me all winter to read all 15 novels, but well worth the time and effort. Should have done so years ago.