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Wessex Tales
In addition to his great "Wessex Novels," Thomas Hardy wrote Wessex Tales (1896), a collection of six stories written in the 1880s and 1890s that, for the most part, are as bleakly ironic and unforgiving as the darkest of his great novels -- Jude the Obscure. But this great novelist began and ended his writing career as a poet. In-between, he wrote a number of books that many readers find emotionally-wrenching, but which are considered among the classics of 19th Century British literature, including Far from the Madding Crowd, and Tess of the D'Urbervilles. Readers will experience Hardy's uncompromising, unsentimental realism in Wessex Tales, and for those seeking a taste of the Dorset poet and novelist, they represent an ideal start.
287 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1888
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About the author
Thomas Hardy
2,277 books6,745 followersThomas 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.
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.
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July 13, 2024
Note, July 13, 2024: I've just added some material to this review, partly copied-and-pasted from a comment by fellow Goodreader Brian E. Reynolds in the Works of Thomas Hardy group, briefly explaining the differences in content between different editions of this collection.
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorset, a county in southwestern England, and grew up there. He was deeply steeped in the rhythms and folkways of traditional rural life --which still largely survived in his childhood, and into his young manhood-- in England's southwest (and tended to regret their passing away, as a result of the increasing pressures towards cultural homogenization and economic centralization in the later 19th century, driven by the agenda of the rising industrial economic elite). Most, if not all (I'd say all, but I haven't read all of it, though I've read all of his major novels) of his fiction is set in the southwestern counties, which in much of his corpus becomes his fictional county of Wessex, named after the early medieval domain of the West Saxons. (Names of localities in his works are typically changed from the real-life ones --Oxford, for instance, becomes "Christminster"-- but the real-life localities and geographical relationships are clearly recognizable to anyone who's familiar with that part of England.) All six of the stories here are set in Wessex, and though the collection was originally published in 1888, the circumstances and flavor of the tales suggest a setting decades earlier (and draw in some cases on real-life events he was told about as a child, which he refers to in his short Preface).
"A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We tale-tellers are all Ancient Mariners, and none of us is warranted in stopping Wedding Guests (in other words, the hurrying public) unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman," Hardy wrote in 1893. IMO, the stories here pass that test with flying colors. Their tone is often (though not always) somber and pessimistic; and I've now come to share the critical consensus that Hardy ascribes a major role in shaping his characters' situations to Fate. He's also pessimistic about the ability of many humans to live up to their better potential (since his view of Fate doesn't deny that his characters make choices --and often unwise and/or selfish ones--that influence their circumstances, and those of others). But it's clear that he wishes that they would, and has no problem with thinking that they should; his fiction is guided by a moral compass which, one would surmise, probably came from his childhood rearing. Of course, it's a moral compass that also leads him to be critical of hypocrisy and injustice in Victorian society.
The three most memorable individual stories here, for me, were "The Three Strangers," "The Withered Arm," and my personal favorite, "The Distracted Preacher," whose title character is a high-principled Methodist minister who becomes pastor of a seaside congregation in a community where smuggling is a mainstay of livelihood for many of the people. (Though raised in the Anglican church, the adult Hardy was a religious skeptic who wished he could believe, but couldn't; but his treatment of a clergyman protagonist here is sympathetic rather than hostile.) Smugglers' tactics here are depicted with a realism born of listening to real-life oral descriptions from a former smuggler, who in later life worked for Hardy's father. (I'd previously read the first two stories named above; the first one was actually my introduction to Hardy's work, back in high school.) Themes/messages which appear in the stories of this collection include dysfunctional marital and family relationships, the destructive effects of pride and of misunderstanding between people, the oppressive effects of the legal system on the rural poor, and implicit criticism of the double standard of sexual morals which acquitted males and penalized women. Several of the tales reflect regional customs and folklore, such as the idea that the touch of a newly-hanged criminal's dead hand had power to cure certain physical ailments ("The Withered Arm"). In general, Hardy's literary style can fairly be called an effective blend of Romantic and Realist; he seeks to (and does) produce an emotional effect on the reader, but also to produce a true picture of real life in his setting, which gives the stories a strong feel of regionalist Realism, and the one goal seems to be as strong as the other. (Some readers might view "The Withered Arm" as supernatural fiction, but I personally believe that the author saw the phenomena depicted as purely psychological in origin.) Though some were more memorable than others, I found all six of the stories to be worthwhile reads.
The six-story version of Wessex Tales which I read is the 1896 edition, which adds the story "An Imaginative Woman" (first published in 1894) to the other five included in the collection's initial publication in 1888. In a third edition published in 1912, he reversed that decision, deleting "An Imaginative Woman" from that edition, but adding two other stories, "A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" and "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion." These three also appear in various editions of another collection he published in his lifetime, Life's Little Ironies.
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorset, a county in southwestern England, and grew up there. He was deeply steeped in the rhythms and folkways of traditional rural life --which still largely survived in his childhood, and into his young manhood-- in England's southwest (and tended to regret their passing away, as a result of the increasing pressures towards cultural homogenization and economic centralization in the later 19th century, driven by the agenda of the rising industrial economic elite). Most, if not all (I'd say all, but I haven't read all of it, though I've read all of his major novels) of his fiction is set in the southwestern counties, which in much of his corpus becomes his fictional county of Wessex, named after the early medieval domain of the West Saxons. (Names of localities in his works are typically changed from the real-life ones --Oxford, for instance, becomes "Christminster"-- but the real-life localities and geographical relationships are clearly recognizable to anyone who's familiar with that part of England.) All six of the stories here are set in Wessex, and though the collection was originally published in 1888, the circumstances and flavor of the tales suggest a setting decades earlier (and draw in some cases on real-life events he was told about as a child, which he refers to in his short Preface).
"A story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling. We tale-tellers are all Ancient Mariners, and none of us is warranted in stopping Wedding Guests (in other words, the hurrying public) unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman," Hardy wrote in 1893. IMO, the stories here pass that test with flying colors. Their tone is often (though not always) somber and pessimistic; and I've now come to share the critical consensus that Hardy ascribes a major role in shaping his characters' situations to Fate. He's also pessimistic about the ability of many humans to live up to their better potential (since his view of Fate doesn't deny that his characters make choices --and often unwise and/or selfish ones--that influence their circumstances, and those of others). But it's clear that he wishes that they would, and has no problem with thinking that they should; his fiction is guided by a moral compass which, one would surmise, probably came from his childhood rearing. Of course, it's a moral compass that also leads him to be critical of hypocrisy and injustice in Victorian society.
The three most memorable individual stories here, for me, were "The Three Strangers," "The Withered Arm," and my personal favorite, "The Distracted Preacher," whose title character is a high-principled Methodist minister who becomes pastor of a seaside congregation in a community where smuggling is a mainstay of livelihood for many of the people. (Though raised in the Anglican church, the adult Hardy was a religious skeptic who wished he could believe, but couldn't; but his treatment of a clergyman protagonist here is sympathetic rather than hostile.) Smugglers' tactics here are depicted with a realism born of listening to real-life oral descriptions from a former smuggler, who in later life worked for Hardy's father. (I'd previously read the first two stories named above; the first one was actually my introduction to Hardy's work, back in high school.) Themes/messages which appear in the stories of this collection include dysfunctional marital and family relationships, the destructive effects of pride and of misunderstanding between people, the oppressive effects of the legal system on the rural poor, and implicit criticism of the double standard of sexual morals which acquitted males and penalized women. Several of the tales reflect regional customs and folklore, such as the idea that the touch of a newly-hanged criminal's dead hand had power to cure certain physical ailments ("The Withered Arm"). In general, Hardy's literary style can fairly be called an effective blend of Romantic and Realist; he seeks to (and does) produce an emotional effect on the reader, but also to produce a true picture of real life in his setting, which gives the stories a strong feel of regionalist Realism, and the one goal seems to be as strong as the other. (Some readers might view "The Withered Arm" as supernatural fiction, but I personally believe that the author saw the phenomena depicted as purely psychological in origin.) Though some were more memorable than others, I found all six of the stories to be worthwhile reads.
The six-story version of Wessex Tales which I read is the 1896 edition, which adds the story "An Imaginative Woman" (first published in 1894) to the other five included in the collection's initial publication in 1888. In a third edition published in 1912, he reversed that decision, deleting "An Imaginative Woman" from that edition, but adding two other stories, "A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" and "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion." These three also appear in various editions of another collection he published in his lifetime, Life's Little Ironies.
November 27, 2022
Even though I have an ongoing personal project to read most of Thomas Hardy, I had never seriously considered his short stories until a group here on Goodreads started reading them, and I couldn’t resist joining.
These are Victorian potboilers destined for publication in magazines. No one’s pretending they aren’t. It clearly isn’t here that Hardy was applying himself with subtlety to characterization and theme. But for all that, I found this an engaging and likable collection, with a few strong stories and plenty of readable ones. Like most of his works, it’s set in the semi-fictional Wessex.
In “An Imaginative Woman,” a dreamy young wife and mother becomes obsessed with a poet whom she never meets, and this obsession fuels her frustration at her own unused and unappreciated creativity. Though highly melodramatic I found this a striking tale of domesticity and motherhood thwarting a woman's hopes and dreams, that could make a wonderful companion read to “The Yellow Wall-paper.”
“The Three Strangers” is a comic tale of a dark and stormy night and mistaken identity and asks the question, in a small rural community, do people feel allegiance to the law, or to their neighbours?
“The Withered Arm” has a supernatural tone that plays up both melodrama and coincidence. It reminded me quite a bit of both Tess and The Return of the Native with jilted lovers and folk magic… actually, despite the magical element this was the most Hardyian of all the stories, kind of Hardy on steroids.
“Fellow Townsmen” was a nonsensical entry about which the less said the better.
In “Interlopers at the Knap,” we’re treated to a supremely atmospheric beginning, with Farmer Darton riding down a long road at twilight, once a highway for Elizabeth I’s men, now a disused cart-track. He comes to a fork in the road, at which stands a sign post with nothing written on it (life, anyone?). And he chooses a way forward. Not all of the story lived up to this beginning, but it raises interesting questions about marriage, who benefits, who is likely to be made happy by it.
And “The Distracted Preacher” was just great fun, as a straightlaced young preacher moves into a village full of smugglers and falls in love with his landlady, who has a penchant for walking the moors at night in her dead husband’s clothing and has more than a few secrets up her sleeve. This story never feels serious, but with a set-up like that, who wants it to be.
Overall, these tales more than delivered on what I expected, with “An Imaginative Woman” and “The Distracted Preacher” standouts in very different ways. And all of them are written with consummate skill, despite some frankly ridiculous plots, I was compelled to turn pages.
These are Victorian potboilers destined for publication in magazines. No one’s pretending they aren’t. It clearly isn’t here that Hardy was applying himself with subtlety to characterization and theme. But for all that, I found this an engaging and likable collection, with a few strong stories and plenty of readable ones. Like most of his works, it’s set in the semi-fictional Wessex.
In “An Imaginative Woman,” a dreamy young wife and mother becomes obsessed with a poet whom she never meets, and this obsession fuels her frustration at her own unused and unappreciated creativity. Though highly melodramatic I found this a striking tale of domesticity and motherhood thwarting a woman's hopes and dreams, that could make a wonderful companion read to “The Yellow Wall-paper.”
“The Three Strangers” is a comic tale of a dark and stormy night and mistaken identity and asks the question, in a small rural community, do people feel allegiance to the law, or to their neighbours?
“The Withered Arm” has a supernatural tone that plays up both melodrama and coincidence. It reminded me quite a bit of both Tess and The Return of the Native with jilted lovers and folk magic… actually, despite the magical element this was the most Hardyian of all the stories, kind of Hardy on steroids.
“Fellow Townsmen” was a nonsensical entry about which the less said the better.
In “Interlopers at the Knap,” we’re treated to a supremely atmospheric beginning, with Farmer Darton riding down a long road at twilight, once a highway for Elizabeth I’s men, now a disused cart-track. He comes to a fork in the road, at which stands a sign post with nothing written on it (life, anyone?). And he chooses a way forward. Not all of the story lived up to this beginning, but it raises interesting questions about marriage, who benefits, who is likely to be made happy by it.
And “The Distracted Preacher” was just great fun, as a straightlaced young preacher moves into a village full of smugglers and falls in love with his landlady, who has a penchant for walking the moors at night in her dead husband’s clothing and has more than a few secrets up her sleeve. This story never feels serious, but with a set-up like that, who wants it to be.
Overall, these tales more than delivered on what I expected, with “An Imaginative Woman” and “The Distracted Preacher” standouts in very different ways. And all of them are written with consummate skill, despite some frankly ridiculous plots, I was compelled to turn pages.
May 31, 2013
By now I think I must have made it fairly obvious that I love Thomas Hardy, and so I was looking forward to my re-reading of this superb collection of Hardy shorter fiction for my on-going Hardy reading challenge.
Wessex Tales contains seven stories, the first two of them really very short – the others considerably longer. In this collection Hardy explored familiar themes of marriage and rural life that we see in his novels, but he also experiments rather in a supernatural tale, ‘The Withered Arm’, which I think I have read at least three times, as it crops up in various other short story collections. The Three Strangers is wonderfully atmospheric, with a delightful little twist, although short it is a perfectly crafted little story, a small isolated cottage, packed with local folk for a celebration, inclement weather and the unexpected arrival of three strangers. ‘The Withered Arm’ – for me at least – is right up there with the best of the gothic type ghost and supernatural stories. There’s a wronged woman, an illegitimate child, a pretty young wife, a curse and a wonderful twist – delicious.
Hardy doesn’t allow himself to be in anyway curtailed by the genre of the short story – he gives full reign to his imagination, and his characters are fully explored. Hardy presents us with men making foolish and rash decisions in the pursuit of marriage, the women they reject so obviously superior. Using irony, coincidence, comedy and tragedy, devices that are so familiar to readers of his novels, Hardy could quite easily have spun out several of these brilliantly constructed stories into novels. In ‘Fellow Townsmen’ and ‘Interlopers at the Knap’ the stories span many years – characters are made to regret the decisions of the past. While in ‘The Distracted Preacher’, a good man puts his principles to one side in order to help the woman he loves – in a wonderfully atmospheric and slightly comic tale of smugglers.
Hardy was very aware of the changing world in which he lived – and in the Wessex Tales it is a world that is presented to us with the great understanding and affection that he had for it. Born and brought up in a humble home Hardy understood the rural world that he wrote about, he understood the work of the furze cutter and the shepherd, he had an ear for the dialect of the region, which he reproduces in many minor characters, characters who no matter how minor they are manage to be completely real.
“Is it necessary to add that the echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque time, still linger about here, in more or less fragmentary form to be caught by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget.”
Hardy even manages to lend some of his stories an air of traditional folklore – the story being re-told by a nameless narrator after a passage of time. I wonder if it these were the kind of stories that Hardy would have grown up hearing.
Although I do love Hardy’s pastoral novels best, I think his shorter fiction to be very well worth reading, and wonder if it doesn’t sometimes get overlooked a little. I actually think that The Wessex Tales wouldn’t be a bad place to start for those who have never read any Thomas Hardy.
Wessex Tales contains seven stories, the first two of them really very short – the others considerably longer. In this collection Hardy explored familiar themes of marriage and rural life that we see in his novels, but he also experiments rather in a supernatural tale, ‘The Withered Arm’, which I think I have read at least three times, as it crops up in various other short story collections. The Three Strangers is wonderfully atmospheric, with a delightful little twist, although short it is a perfectly crafted little story, a small isolated cottage, packed with local folk for a celebration, inclement weather and the unexpected arrival of three strangers. ‘The Withered Arm’ – for me at least – is right up there with the best of the gothic type ghost and supernatural stories. There’s a wronged woman, an illegitimate child, a pretty young wife, a curse and a wonderful twist – delicious.
Hardy doesn’t allow himself to be in anyway curtailed by the genre of the short story – he gives full reign to his imagination, and his characters are fully explored. Hardy presents us with men making foolish and rash decisions in the pursuit of marriage, the women they reject so obviously superior. Using irony, coincidence, comedy and tragedy, devices that are so familiar to readers of his novels, Hardy could quite easily have spun out several of these brilliantly constructed stories into novels. In ‘Fellow Townsmen’ and ‘Interlopers at the Knap’ the stories span many years – characters are made to regret the decisions of the past. While in ‘The Distracted Preacher’, a good man puts his principles to one side in order to help the woman he loves – in a wonderfully atmospheric and slightly comic tale of smugglers.
Hardy was very aware of the changing world in which he lived – and in the Wessex Tales it is a world that is presented to us with the great understanding and affection that he had for it. Born and brought up in a humble home Hardy understood the rural world that he wrote about, he understood the work of the furze cutter and the shepherd, he had an ear for the dialect of the region, which he reproduces in many minor characters, characters who no matter how minor they are manage to be completely real.
“Is it necessary to add that the echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque time, still linger about here, in more or less fragmentary form to be caught by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget.”
Hardy even manages to lend some of his stories an air of traditional folklore – the story being re-told by a nameless narrator after a passage of time. I wonder if it these were the kind of stories that Hardy would have grown up hearing.
Although I do love Hardy’s pastoral novels best, I think his shorter fiction to be very well worth reading, and wonder if it doesn’t sometimes get overlooked a little. I actually think that The Wessex Tales wouldn’t be a bad place to start for those who have never read any Thomas Hardy.
February 5, 2022
Many years ago we visited Thomas Hardy country in Dorset, England and I bought Wessex Tales, seven short stories that Hardy wrote about his native county. The book holds special memories for me of the summer day that we visited the cottage where Hardy was born in 1840 in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, and where he wrote Under the Greenwood Tree and Far From the Madding Crowd. For me it was a literary pilgrimage to the shrine of one of my favorite authors.
Hardy fictionalized Dorset County as Wessex in this group of seven short stories. Wessex also became the setting for most of his novels. These tales are based on stories and folklore of his native Dorset in the early 1800s to about 1830, a generation before Hardy was born. Hardy was afraid that the folklore, history and tales that had been passed down for generations were disappearing and set about preserving them in several volumes of short stories.
Alternately macabre (The Withered Arm), humorous (The Three Strangers), sadly fatalistic (Fellow-Townsmen), and tragic (The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion), these tales are all strongly connected to Hardy's love of his native Dorset.
I loved the humorous tale of the rum smugglers in The Distracted Preacher and could feel the excitement of Lizzy as she encouraged the preacher to accompany her on a smuggling expedition. "I'm sure you will enjoy it! Everybody does who tries it," said Lizzy, and indeed, smuggling was not only the excitement, but the lifeblood of the town. "My father did it, and so did my grandfather and almost everybody in Nether-Moynton lives by it and life would be so dull if it wasn't for that, that I should not care to live at all," she elaborates. By the time Hardy was born, there was no more rum smuggling, it having been taken over by a criminal element and strongly quashed by the government.
Hardy, ever faithful to his beloved Dorset, knew and wrote about his county fervently, forever preserving its folklore and history in the characters who lived in Wessex (however much he constrained them with circumstance and timing). I was excited to come upon this book once again and not only enjoy Hardy's engaging tales, but also relive the time we visited Dorset and the cottage where he was born.
Following is a picture and information about Thomas Hardy's cottage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...
Hardy fictionalized Dorset County as Wessex in this group of seven short stories. Wessex also became the setting for most of his novels. These tales are based on stories and folklore of his native Dorset in the early 1800s to about 1830, a generation before Hardy was born. Hardy was afraid that the folklore, history and tales that had been passed down for generations were disappearing and set about preserving them in several volumes of short stories.
Alternately macabre (The Withered Arm), humorous (The Three Strangers), sadly fatalistic (Fellow-Townsmen), and tragic (The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion), these tales are all strongly connected to Hardy's love of his native Dorset.
I loved the humorous tale of the rum smugglers in The Distracted Preacher and could feel the excitement of Lizzy as she encouraged the preacher to accompany her on a smuggling expedition. "I'm sure you will enjoy it! Everybody does who tries it," said Lizzy, and indeed, smuggling was not only the excitement, but the lifeblood of the town. "My father did it, and so did my grandfather and almost everybody in Nether-Moynton lives by it and life would be so dull if it wasn't for that, that I should not care to live at all," she elaborates. By the time Hardy was born, there was no more rum smuggling, it having been taken over by a criminal element and strongly quashed by the government.
Hardy, ever faithful to his beloved Dorset, knew and wrote about his county fervently, forever preserving its folklore and history in the characters who lived in Wessex (however much he constrained them with circumstance and timing). I was excited to come upon this book once again and not only enjoy Hardy's engaging tales, but also relive the time we visited Dorset and the cottage where he was born.
Following is a picture and information about Thomas Hardy's cottage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_...
January 9, 2022
There are 3 different editions of this book. My version is the 1896 edition with 6 stories and omits 2 stories added in 1912. But as my edition of Life’s Little Ironies included The Tradition of 1804 and Melancholy Hussar, I had already read those two stories.*
The stories in this volume generally deal with regrets over romances unfulfilled due to bad timing, bad judgment, lost opportunities and stubbornness. Happy endings are not often found, although there is at least one story with such an ending in this collection. However, while his novels are often tragic, these short stories are more melancholic than tragic. I enjoyed all the stories as I am in sync with Hardy’s storytelling abilities and writing style.
This is my review of each of the 6 stories:
AN IMAGINITIVE WOMAN -1894
Hardy uses fate, coincidences and lost opportunities to formulate not-so-happy endings.. In this short story Hardy uses these devices to create fateful story of a housewife/frustrated poet looking for love and an emotional experience with a fellow, but more skilled, poet she has not even met. She becomes infatuated with this poet while staying with her family in rooms he is the permanent resident of in a coastal resort town. There is almost a black humor to the abrupt and unhappy ending as one can only smile at Hardy’s skillful use of his devices. A moderately good and odd story improved by the ending.
THE THREE STRANGERS - 1883
This story does not involve romance. Instead, this story has a suspenseful sense of foreboding as the titled three strangers separately ‘crash’ a christening celebration to seek refuge from a rainstorm. The ending is a bit surprising and very satisfying. This story is set in the 1820s and felt like a folktale.
THE WITHERED ARM - 1888
Coincidences and fate also play a part in this tale of a woman suffering a withered arm possibly due to the efforts of her husband’s previous lover. The superstitions and folk remedies prevalent among the rustic Wessex denizens play a significant role in this story, but Hardy somehow makes it all seem realistic. I thought the first half of the story was quite interesting, but the turn in the story towards the end, while bringing some interesting suspense, was not fully satisfying. But then Hardy stories rarely end as the reader would hope.
FELLOW-TOWNSMEN - 1880
This is a tale of a wealthy townsman, his wife, his former sweetheart, a fellow townsman solicitor, the solicitor’s wife and other town residents. This being a long short story, more of a short novella, allows Hardy to create several plot-changing events. Hardy creates a melancholic atmosphere as characters strive for happiness amongst regret over lost opportunities. One spends the story wondering whether Hardy will defy his usual tendency to block such happiness. A well told and satisfying story.
INTERLOPERS AT THE KNAP - 1884
This tale of a years long romance is similar in tone to the Fellow-Townsmen and also involves a man’s romantic choice among a few women. Regret and lost opportunities again abound, although the plot and conclusion presented here are less dark than usual with Hardy. The main female protagonist is admirably strong willed.
THE DISTRACTED PREACHER – 1879
Like Fellow-Townsman, this also is more of a short novella. It is a tale of a substitute preacher and his romance with his widowed landlord in a seaside town. The drama comes from the tension between the preachers’ desire to live right and the widows desire to continue participation in the towns’ customary smuggling operation. It had scenes reminiscent of some Poldark episodes. The romantic tension is done well although I found my sympathy more with the widow than the preacher protagonist. In her, Hardy created another interesting and strong female protagonist.
*Wikipedia reports 3 different versions of Wessex Tales:
1) Initially, in 1888, it contained five stories, all previously published in periodicals....
• "The Three Strangers" (1883)
• "The Withered Arm" (1888)
• "Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)
• "Interlopers at the Knap" (1884)
• "The Distracted Preacher" (1879)
2) For the 1896 reprinting, Hardy added a sixth...
• "An Imaginative Woman" (1894)
3) In 1912, he reversed that decision, moving "An Imaginative Woman" to another collection, Life's Little Ironies (1894), while at the same time transferring two of the latter collection's stories...
• "A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)
• "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion" (1890)
...to Wessex Tales for a final total of seven stories in Wessex Tales.
The stories in this volume generally deal with regrets over romances unfulfilled due to bad timing, bad judgment, lost opportunities and stubbornness. Happy endings are not often found, although there is at least one story with such an ending in this collection. However, while his novels are often tragic, these short stories are more melancholic than tragic. I enjoyed all the stories as I am in sync with Hardy’s storytelling abilities and writing style.
This is my review of each of the 6 stories:
AN IMAGINITIVE WOMAN -1894
Hardy uses fate, coincidences and lost opportunities to formulate not-so-happy endings.. In this short story Hardy uses these devices to create fateful story of a housewife/frustrated poet looking for love and an emotional experience with a fellow, but more skilled, poet she has not even met. She becomes infatuated with this poet while staying with her family in rooms he is the permanent resident of in a coastal resort town. There is almost a black humor to the abrupt and unhappy ending as one can only smile at Hardy’s skillful use of his devices. A moderately good and odd story improved by the ending.
THE THREE STRANGERS - 1883
This story does not involve romance. Instead, this story has a suspenseful sense of foreboding as the titled three strangers separately ‘crash’ a christening celebration to seek refuge from a rainstorm. The ending is a bit surprising and very satisfying. This story is set in the 1820s and felt like a folktale.
THE WITHERED ARM - 1888
Coincidences and fate also play a part in this tale of a woman suffering a withered arm possibly due to the efforts of her husband’s previous lover. The superstitions and folk remedies prevalent among the rustic Wessex denizens play a significant role in this story, but Hardy somehow makes it all seem realistic. I thought the first half of the story was quite interesting, but the turn in the story towards the end, while bringing some interesting suspense, was not fully satisfying. But then Hardy stories rarely end as the reader would hope.
FELLOW-TOWNSMEN - 1880
This is a tale of a wealthy townsman, his wife, his former sweetheart, a fellow townsman solicitor, the solicitor’s wife and other town residents. This being a long short story, more of a short novella, allows Hardy to create several plot-changing events. Hardy creates a melancholic atmosphere as characters strive for happiness amongst regret over lost opportunities. One spends the story wondering whether Hardy will defy his usual tendency to block such happiness. A well told and satisfying story.
INTERLOPERS AT THE KNAP - 1884
This tale of a years long romance is similar in tone to the Fellow-Townsmen and also involves a man’s romantic choice among a few women. Regret and lost opportunities again abound, although the plot and conclusion presented here are less dark than usual with Hardy. The main female protagonist is admirably strong willed.
THE DISTRACTED PREACHER – 1879
Like Fellow-Townsman, this also is more of a short novella. It is a tale of a substitute preacher and his romance with his widowed landlord in a seaside town. The drama comes from the tension between the preachers’ desire to live right and the widows desire to continue participation in the towns’ customary smuggling operation. It had scenes reminiscent of some Poldark episodes. The romantic tension is done well although I found my sympathy more with the widow than the preacher protagonist. In her, Hardy created another interesting and strong female protagonist.
*Wikipedia reports 3 different versions of Wessex Tales:
1) Initially, in 1888, it contained five stories, all previously published in periodicals....
• "The Three Strangers" (1883)
• "The Withered Arm" (1888)
• "Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)
• "Interlopers at the Knap" (1884)
• "The Distracted Preacher" (1879)
2) For the 1896 reprinting, Hardy added a sixth...
• "An Imaginative Woman" (1894)
3) In 1912, he reversed that decision, moving "An Imaginative Woman" to another collection, Life's Little Ironies (1894), while at the same time transferring two of the latter collection's stories...
• "A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)
• "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion" (1890)
...to Wessex Tales for a final total of seven stories in Wessex Tales.
February 2, 2024
Some excellent short stories that captures the characters and life in the 1800s in Wessex. Smuggling, unrequited love, executions by the hangman with exquisite prose.
December 13, 2023
I will devour anything Thomas Hardy. His idyllic settings paired with his genius prose make for a worthy read regardless of plot and characterisation. How he weaves melancholy and the fatality but also the fragility of life is nothing but masterful. Despite the centuries gone by, I always feel you can learn a lot from his works if you transfer the message and meanings to modern-day life. That is no different here. Wessex Tales is a collection of his short stories, containing seven in total. I will not spoil anything, as whether you know the traits of Hardy or not, I believe it would be better to go in wholly blind as I did. What I will say though, is that each is delightful. It will be easy to find yourself engrossed thanks to the exploration of the realistic but also the fantastical Hardy employs throughout which allows him to create short stories both humourous and tragic to adore.
November 29, 2016
A ready enjoyable read - a lot of great stories, and some quite different to other Hardy works, more influenced by the gothic, etc. I especially loved the story 'An Imaginative Woman'.
May 12, 2025
Wessex Tales was Thomas Hardy's first collection of stories to be published, initially as two volumes, in 1888. This is my second read of the author's work. Sincerely speaking, I can't add anything new about Thomas Hardy's writing. According to the introduction, each story included in the book is steeped in the rich history and traditional lore of Wessex and some are based on memories of the author's youth.
Almost each story has themes of tragedy such as unrealized dreams, marital discord, unrequited love, death and so on. At the same time, some of the stories also have elements of suspense, witchcraft and adventure. Of the seven stories included in this book, only two had happy endings.
I found the book to be a very satisfying read and would sincerely recommend it to lovers of classic literature.
Almost each story has themes of tragedy such as unrealized dreams, marital discord, unrequited love, death and so on. At the same time, some of the stories also have elements of suspense, witchcraft and adventure. Of the seven stories included in this book, only two had happy endings.
I found the book to be a very satisfying read and would sincerely recommend it to lovers of classic literature.
April 17, 2021
The Wessex Tales is a collection of five short stories written by Thomas Hardy and first published in book form in 1888. The sub-title is Strange, Lively and Commonplace. They are entitled, The Three Strangers, The Withered Arm, Fellow-Townsmen, Interlopers at the Knap and The Distracted Preacher.
Of these, the first is the weakest, but only because it uses a plot device we have seen before; having said that, it may have been new and novel in 1888 so this is not really a criticism of the author. The second encompasses a bit of old-fashioned superstition … almost witchcraft, in which I suspect many people in rural England would have believed in those days despite the best efforts of the Church.
The one factor featuring in all of Hardy’s stories, whether short like these or the full novels, is his grasp of, and powers to describe, human nature and the innermost thoughts of his characters, certainly that of the main protagonist. This is the reason that his books still sell today because the human propensity to agonise, to make mistakes, to err and to change one’s mind, are universal to the human condition irrespective of time and place.
I found this book very enjoyable despite the fact that they do not all end happily (how true to life), and I really wanted to know what would come next as the stories progressed, so Hardy had me hooked. The last story was particularly entrancing, and I could hardly wait to find out what would happen … and I’m not going to spoil it for you.
Of these, the first is the weakest, but only because it uses a plot device we have seen before; having said that, it may have been new and novel in 1888 so this is not really a criticism of the author. The second encompasses a bit of old-fashioned superstition … almost witchcraft, in which I suspect many people in rural England would have believed in those days despite the best efforts of the Church.
The one factor featuring in all of Hardy’s stories, whether short like these or the full novels, is his grasp of, and powers to describe, human nature and the innermost thoughts of his characters, certainly that of the main protagonist. This is the reason that his books still sell today because the human propensity to agonise, to make mistakes, to err and to change one’s mind, are universal to the human condition irrespective of time and place.
I found this book very enjoyable despite the fact that they do not all end happily (how true to life), and I really wanted to know what would come next as the stories progressed, so Hardy had me hooked. The last story was particularly entrancing, and I could hardly wait to find out what would happen … and I’m not going to spoil it for you.
February 5, 2017
It took me a long time to read Hardy, I guess there is a fear of approaching a great novelist. These short stories are an ideal introduction, after reading these I was inspired to read "Tess of the D'Ubervilles" and I am currently reading "The Return of the Native". Hardy is like the rural equivalent of Dickens, exposing the inequalities of the Victorian Countryside just as Dickens was exposing the inequalities in Victorian London. Hardy's tales are set in Wessex which loosely corresponds with Dorset. Industrialisation is slowly coming to the countryside, there is a sense keenly felt by Hardy that many of the ways will be gone for ever. In Wessex Tales Hardy shows sympathy with the work of shepherds, dairymaids and smugglers. The stories are never rushed they have a gentle pace befitting their 19th century rural setting. Hardy is meticulous with details of the land and agricultural practices, he is a reliable companion to take you on a journey back to 19th century England.
December 27, 2022
An enjoyable collection of stories. A touch of supernatural in ‘The withered arm’, ‘The three strangers’ is a clever story of a man escaping the hangman, ‘the distracted preacher’ is a fun story about the smuggling trade spoiled for me by its moralistic ending, ‘interlopers at the knap’ and ‘fellow townsmen’ are both about marriage mishaps, and my favourite ‘the imaginative woman’ where the title character has an obsession about a poet whose house her family stay in for the holidays.
November 28, 2022
I have not read any Thomas Hardy since an unfortunate encounter with Tess of the Durbervilles back in middle school, when I was still praying for every nineteenth-century novel to be like Jane Austen’s and kept being cruelly disappointed. So it was high time for me to give him another chance.
Turns out my taste hasn’t changed all that much.
Wessex Tales is a collection of short stories Hardy had previously published in periodicals. Although they are disconnected by character and setting, they mostly feel cohesive in their tone and approach. They are all set in villages or small towns in England’s southwest, and the people he focuses on tend to be at the shaky end of the middle class. Most of the stories include a desired woman who resists being attained.
Short stories in general have a challenge in getting the reader to invest quickly in the fates of their characters, and there is an emotional detachment running through all these pieces that kept me even further at arm’s length. Hardy also seems to take pleasure in denying his readers a conventional ending, so these stories all feel emotionally unsatisfying to one degree or another. He routinely favors plot points over characterization, and the impression I was left with was that of a puppeteer reveling in his power to jerk the strings.
Several of the female characters had an independent streak that tempted me to root for them, but Hardy never strayed far beneath the surface of their behavior. A partial exception is the final story, “The Distracted Preacher,” in which the heroine at least expresses her thoughts; even there, I felt she was saying only part of what was in her mind and heart, and a greater part of her remained walled off. Nevertheless, that story was my favorite, as it includes an interesting depiction of smuggling.
Perhaps the remaining span of my life is too short to give Hardy a further trial.
Turns out my taste hasn’t changed all that much.
Wessex Tales is a collection of short stories Hardy had previously published in periodicals. Although they are disconnected by character and setting, they mostly feel cohesive in their tone and approach. They are all set in villages or small towns in England’s southwest, and the people he focuses on tend to be at the shaky end of the middle class. Most of the stories include a desired woman who resists being attained.
Short stories in general have a challenge in getting the reader to invest quickly in the fates of their characters, and there is an emotional detachment running through all these pieces that kept me even further at arm’s length. Hardy also seems to take pleasure in denying his readers a conventional ending, so these stories all feel emotionally unsatisfying to one degree or another. He routinely favors plot points over characterization, and the impression I was left with was that of a puppeteer reveling in his power to jerk the strings.
Several of the female characters had an independent streak that tempted me to root for them, but Hardy never strayed far beneath the surface of their behavior. A partial exception is the final story, “The Distracted Preacher,” in which the heroine at least expresses her thoughts; even there, I felt she was saying only part of what was in her mind and heart, and a greater part of her remained walled off. Nevertheless, that story was my favorite, as it includes an interesting depiction of smuggling.
Perhaps the remaining span of my life is too short to give Hardy a further trial.
September 29, 2014
Not all editions of Wessex Tales are created equal. It was first published in 1888 with 5 stories. A new edition was published in 1896, which included a new story "An Imaginative Woman." There was one more edition in 1912 which included the core five stories, but seemingly played musical chairs with others.
I have been reading Hardy on my Kindle (Complete Works of Thomas Hardy) which included the 1896 edition. I'm so glad for that, else I would have missed that added story, which was one of my favorites of the collection. A married woman thinks she has fallen in love with a popular poet, though she has never met him other than through his poetry and some very minor correspondence. The second story, "The Three Strangers", has led me to see that Hardy often uses lighter, perhaps more simple/innocent people, to contrast even more sharply the darker side of his work.
Those two stories together with the last story, "The Distracted Preacher" were my favorites of the six. This story uses as its vehicle a smuggling operation and showed that Hardy is quite capable of foregoing his darker side and has a sense of humor, though the humor is definitely not the broader humor of Trollope. Yes, I had my favorites in this collection, but all were enjoyable.
I have been reading Hardy on my Kindle (Complete Works of Thomas Hardy) which included the 1896 edition. I'm so glad for that, else I would have missed that added story, which was one of my favorites of the collection. A married woman thinks she has fallen in love with a popular poet, though she has never met him other than through his poetry and some very minor correspondence. The second story, "The Three Strangers", has led me to see that Hardy often uses lighter, perhaps more simple/innocent people, to contrast even more sharply the darker side of his work.
Those two stories together with the last story, "The Distracted Preacher" were my favorites of the six. This story uses as its vehicle a smuggling operation and showed that Hardy is quite capable of foregoing his darker side and has a sense of humor, though the humor is definitely not the broader humor of Trollope. Yes, I had my favorites in this collection, but all were enjoyable.
August 21, 2012
In the first place, I love Thomas Hardy so the fact I would like his Wessex Tales is a given.
Hardy also shows his versatility in depicting the lives of every day people, the poor and the rich, a supernatural tale, a story about smuggling and smugglers and a potential love affair gone awry.
Hardy was also recording legends and customs of his native Dorset.
For me, at least, it was just fun to "go home" and listen to the music of the language.
Hardy also shows his versatility in depicting the lives of every day people, the poor and the rich, a supernatural tale, a story about smuggling and smugglers and a potential love affair gone awry.
Hardy was also recording legends and customs of his native Dorset.
For me, at least, it was just fun to "go home" and listen to the music of the language.
July 15, 2024
Veramente bellissimi questi raccontati ambientati nel Wessex. Ci ho ritrovato tutta la meraviglia dello stile di Hardy che mi era piaciuta in Tess dei d'Urberville. Prima o poi devo davvero leggere Jude l'oscuro, sono sicura che mi piacerà tantissimo.
November 16, 2025
This short story collection is well worth reading. There are tales of Hangmen, supernatural powers, or crime. The tales are set in the rural countryside or small towns of Southwest England in the 1800s. Hardy's storytelling skills are outstanding. This collection is easy to locate online. Read them all at once or slowly over a period of time. The individual stories are fully developed with chapters. Most are really more novellas than short stories. I would highly recommend this book.
February 6, 2022
My first time reading Thomas Hardy and I had a great time. Lots of refreshing, rural stories, some with a nice gothic feel. I particularly enjoyed The Distracted Preacher and The Three Strangers.
January 29, 2023
why so much death god thomas
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 25, 2021
thomas hardy never misses
October 6, 2025
This is Hardy at his best. These short stories and novellas have some wonderful characters. He can't be bettered in his description of the 'Wessex' landscape and its inhabitants.
May 21, 2023
A collection of wonderful short stories, on the author's usual subjects, that is, the lives of ordinary people and the loves that are very difficult to fulfill. I clearly single out the first short story, with its strong poetic romanticism enhanced by the power of the author's writing. Of course, this does not mean that the other short stories are inferior, each other, they all have something special and leave you at the end with a melancholic mood, perhaps sad but certainly beautiful after such a beautiful narrative.
Μία συλλογή από υπέροχες μικρές ιστορίες, στα συνηθισμένα θέματα του συγγραφέα, δηλαδή τη ζωή των απλών ανθρώπων και τους έρωτες που η εκπλήρωση τους είναι κάτι πάρα πολύ δύσκολο. Ξεχωρίζω σαφώς το πρώτο διήγημα, με τον ισχυρό ποιητικό ρομαντισμό του που ενισχύεται από τη δύναμη της γραφής του συγγραφέα. Αυτό φυσικά δεν σημαίνει ότι τα άλλα διηγήματα είναι υποδεέστερα, κάθε άλλο, όλα τους έχουν κάτι το ξεχωριστό και σε αφήνουν στο τέλος με μία μελαγχολική διάθεση, ίσως λυπητερή αλλά σίγουρα όμορφη μετά από μία τόσο όμορφη αφήγησηю
Μία συλλογή από υπέροχες μικρές ιστορίες, στα συνηθισμένα θέματα του συγγραφέα, δηλαδή τη ζωή των απλών ανθρώπων και τους έρωτες που η εκπλήρωση τους είναι κάτι πάρα πολύ δύσκολο. Ξεχωρίζω σαφώς το πρώτο διήγημα, με τον ισχυρό ποιητικό ρομαντισμό του που ενισχύεται από τη δύναμη της γραφής του συγγραφέα. Αυτό φυσικά δεν σημαίνει ότι τα άλλα διηγήματα είναι υποδεέστερα, κάθε άλλο, όλα τους έχουν κάτι το ξεχωριστό και σε αφήνουν στο τέλος με μία μελαγχολική διάθεση, ίσως λυπητερή αλλά σίγουρα όμορφη μετά από μία τόσο όμορφη αφήγησηю
September 28, 2018
Una bella raccolta impreziosita da una prefazione davvero esaustiva e interessante. Racconti che non smentiscono la grandezza di Hardy anche in un genere da molti sottovalutato...
November 6, 2020
Some stories better than others but overall 3.5 stars
April 2, 2021
Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Tales are well-written, and nicely evoke the rural landscape of Hardy’s Wessex, that area of land that has not been Wessex for many centuries. They also contain few real surprises.
Anyone who is familiar with Hardy’s more famous novels will probably reach a point in each story where they find that they can easily predict how it will end. One mistake that writers with artistic pretentions make is to assume that a downbeat ending will somehow be more truly literary. In fact when a writer tends towards ending his works on a melancholic note, the result after a while is just as conventional as any upbeat writer.
Of course a few corrections are necessary here. Not all the stories in Wessex Tales end badly. Also while Hardy has some leanings towards serious writing here, he essentially wrote most of his prose fiction for money, and concentrated his best efforts on his poetry.
It is only in his last few novels that Hardy made a stronger effort to write a better novel, but he pushed his gloomy philosophy to such extremes in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure that he had nowhere left to go from this point and concentrated on his poetry – which was a wise decision in my opinion.
The Wessex Tales are at the lighter and more commercial end of Hardy’s works. Many of the stories are set in the past before Hardy’s birth, and the writer clearly wishes to give the impression that he is collecting stories of folklore from Wessex’s past.
‘The Three Strangers’ is perhaps the best work in the volume, a story in which the celebration of a christening is interrupted by three strangers, one of whom is a hangman that has been sent down to execute a man who stole a lamb, and another one of whom is the hangman’s intended victim, now an escaped fugitive.
Hardy has fun contrasting the happy celebration of the new-born child with the macabre business of hangmen and their victims. It is clear that Hardy is rightly sympathetic towards the man who is trying not to be hanged for such a trifling offence.
‘Eighteen Hundred and Four’ is one of those tales that shows Hardy’s peculiar fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte, something that can be found in other works, both prose and poetry. This rests on the improbable idea that Napoleon landed in Wessex for a private reconnaissance ahead of an invasion that never came. The narrator (Hardy?) solemnly reassures us that he has this on a good source, but really it is little more than a fun story.
‘The Melancholy Hussar’ recalls later Hardy works where Fate and blind chance seem to conspire against the characters, as an affianced woman falls in love with a German Hussar while she is being neglected by her fiancé.
At this stage of his writing, Hardy did not engage in the fist-shaking against God that marks his last works. I have no objection to Hardy’s blasphemies, but cannot help feeling that the suffering of his characters is more often the work of an omnipotent author than an omnipotent deity. Reality is rarely as contrived as it is here. However in ‘The Melancholy Hussar’, it is a series of ironic circumstances rather than a god that causes problems.
The same is true of ‘Fellow Townmen’ where the wrong people die, and the right people die at the wrong time, ensuring that the obvious path of happiness is blocked by a series of improbable coincidences.
We can also say that about the final series of events that conclude ‘The Withered Arm’ where any chance of finding a happy answer to the problems set out is stymied by a dark conclusion that is pure contrivance. However this is an effective story, in which a shunned woman somehow accidentally manages to curse the woman who won over her lover, even though this is done unconsciously in a dream, and against the wishes of the shunned woman. This is again one of the better stories in the volume, offering a nice creepy tale.
‘Interlopers at the Knap’ once more defers lovers who perhaps should be together. A planned marriage is set aside when the would-be bride’s brother turns up with a wife of his own who turns out to be a former lover of the would-be groom. The brother obligingly dies on the same night, and the would-be bride steps aside so her intended husband can marry his old lover. However it does not work out, and he wishes he had married his intended wife instead.
Ending the volume is ‘The Distracted Preacher’, in which a priggish clergyman discovers that the local woman of his choice is in fact a smuggler. He struggles with his conscience while she struggles with the Customs men. This time a happy ending is tacked on, but Hardy cannot resist adding a footnote saying this ending was expected of him at the time, and offering us an alternative ending that he would have preferred to write.
It is easy to condemn Stockdale, the titular preacher, for his horror at discovering that Lizzy Newberry was a smuggler, and his moral qualms probably will not get much sympathy from readers who will feel that she deserves better.
In his defence, I can say that it would be difficult for a man with a religious profession to marry a woman engaged in criminal activities, as that would put his moral standing in the community at risk, and perhaps even lose him his position.
Still it did make me wonder how many clergymen were involved in smuggling operations at the time. Did some of them directly do the smuggling? Or at least provide a base for hiding supplies, knowing that Customs men would not check a church? I am sure plenty of them bought alcohol from smuggled sources, and most of them turned a blind eye to smuggling practices that went on around them.
I recently acquired a number of Hardy works for free, which is why I am working my way through them. It is interesting to contrast the rustic world of Hardy with the urban world of Dickens.
The world of Dickens is one of decay and pollution and filth, whereas Hardy’s world is an outdoors one of fresh air and robust activity, though not always physical good health. Hardy probably has a stronger understanding of the social and economic realities of the community in which he lived.
Overall though it would perhaps be better to live in a Dickens town than a Hardy village. Within the more crowded urban societies, Dickens’ heroes can find allies and communities that ensure they receive love and support. The Hardy hero is trapped in a lonely society with limited choices of marital partners, making it more of a tragedy when relationships fail.
There are some fairly good stories here and none that are particularly bad. Hardy writes well, even if the stories have little real substance to them.
Anyone who is familiar with Hardy’s more famous novels will probably reach a point in each story where they find that they can easily predict how it will end. One mistake that writers with artistic pretentions make is to assume that a downbeat ending will somehow be more truly literary. In fact when a writer tends towards ending his works on a melancholic note, the result after a while is just as conventional as any upbeat writer.
Of course a few corrections are necessary here. Not all the stories in Wessex Tales end badly. Also while Hardy has some leanings towards serious writing here, he essentially wrote most of his prose fiction for money, and concentrated his best efforts on his poetry.
It is only in his last few novels that Hardy made a stronger effort to write a better novel, but he pushed his gloomy philosophy to such extremes in Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure that he had nowhere left to go from this point and concentrated on his poetry – which was a wise decision in my opinion.
The Wessex Tales are at the lighter and more commercial end of Hardy’s works. Many of the stories are set in the past before Hardy’s birth, and the writer clearly wishes to give the impression that he is collecting stories of folklore from Wessex’s past.
‘The Three Strangers’ is perhaps the best work in the volume, a story in which the celebration of a christening is interrupted by three strangers, one of whom is a hangman that has been sent down to execute a man who stole a lamb, and another one of whom is the hangman’s intended victim, now an escaped fugitive.
Hardy has fun contrasting the happy celebration of the new-born child with the macabre business of hangmen and their victims. It is clear that Hardy is rightly sympathetic towards the man who is trying not to be hanged for such a trifling offence.
‘Eighteen Hundred and Four’ is one of those tales that shows Hardy’s peculiar fascination with Napoleon Bonaparte, something that can be found in other works, both prose and poetry. This rests on the improbable idea that Napoleon landed in Wessex for a private reconnaissance ahead of an invasion that never came. The narrator (Hardy?) solemnly reassures us that he has this on a good source, but really it is little more than a fun story.
‘The Melancholy Hussar’ recalls later Hardy works where Fate and blind chance seem to conspire against the characters, as an affianced woman falls in love with a German Hussar while she is being neglected by her fiancé.
At this stage of his writing, Hardy did not engage in the fist-shaking against God that marks his last works. I have no objection to Hardy’s blasphemies, but cannot help feeling that the suffering of his characters is more often the work of an omnipotent author than an omnipotent deity. Reality is rarely as contrived as it is here. However in ‘The Melancholy Hussar’, it is a series of ironic circumstances rather than a god that causes problems.
The same is true of ‘Fellow Townmen’ where the wrong people die, and the right people die at the wrong time, ensuring that the obvious path of happiness is blocked by a series of improbable coincidences.
We can also say that about the final series of events that conclude ‘The Withered Arm’ where any chance of finding a happy answer to the problems set out is stymied by a dark conclusion that is pure contrivance. However this is an effective story, in which a shunned woman somehow accidentally manages to curse the woman who won over her lover, even though this is done unconsciously in a dream, and against the wishes of the shunned woman. This is again one of the better stories in the volume, offering a nice creepy tale.
‘Interlopers at the Knap’ once more defers lovers who perhaps should be together. A planned marriage is set aside when the would-be bride’s brother turns up with a wife of his own who turns out to be a former lover of the would-be groom. The brother obligingly dies on the same night, and the would-be bride steps aside so her intended husband can marry his old lover. However it does not work out, and he wishes he had married his intended wife instead.
Ending the volume is ‘The Distracted Preacher’, in which a priggish clergyman discovers that the local woman of his choice is in fact a smuggler. He struggles with his conscience while she struggles with the Customs men. This time a happy ending is tacked on, but Hardy cannot resist adding a footnote saying this ending was expected of him at the time, and offering us an alternative ending that he would have preferred to write.
It is easy to condemn Stockdale, the titular preacher, for his horror at discovering that Lizzy Newberry was a smuggler, and his moral qualms probably will not get much sympathy from readers who will feel that she deserves better.
In his defence, I can say that it would be difficult for a man with a religious profession to marry a woman engaged in criminal activities, as that would put his moral standing in the community at risk, and perhaps even lose him his position.
Still it did make me wonder how many clergymen were involved in smuggling operations at the time. Did some of them directly do the smuggling? Or at least provide a base for hiding supplies, knowing that Customs men would not check a church? I am sure plenty of them bought alcohol from smuggled sources, and most of them turned a blind eye to smuggling practices that went on around them.
I recently acquired a number of Hardy works for free, which is why I am working my way through them. It is interesting to contrast the rustic world of Hardy with the urban world of Dickens.
The world of Dickens is one of decay and pollution and filth, whereas Hardy’s world is an outdoors one of fresh air and robust activity, though not always physical good health. Hardy probably has a stronger understanding of the social and economic realities of the community in which he lived.
Overall though it would perhaps be better to live in a Dickens town than a Hardy village. Within the more crowded urban societies, Dickens’ heroes can find allies and communities that ensure they receive love and support. The Hardy hero is trapped in a lonely society with limited choices of marital partners, making it more of a tragedy when relationships fail.
There are some fairly good stories here and none that are particularly bad. Hardy writes well, even if the stories have little real substance to them.
November 6, 2021
A very engaging collection of seven short stories set in rural England from 1800 to 1860. The stories generally describe rural scenes and historic ways of life in Southern England, with unexpected endings! I enjoyed all the stories. The characters are well described and there is good plot momentum. I particularly enjoyed ‘Interlopers at the Knap’, which is about farmer Darton’s bad luck concerning his love for Sally Hall. ‘The Distracted Preacher’ is an interesting story about smuggling.
These stories were first published prior to 1880 and published as a collection in 1888.
These stories were first published prior to 1880 and published as a collection in 1888.
November 1, 2010
Sometimes I tire of reading a short story anthology because you get into a story, and then it ends, and then you have to meet a new set of characters, etc. However, for anyone who reads a lot of Hardy, some of these stories were expanded to be included as scenes of some of his novels, and I thought it was fun to examine them under that light.
March 6, 2025
Wessex Tales (1912) by Thomas Hardy
A cracking introduction to Thomas Hardy. I'm a big fan of how empathetic the stories are. They all take you on a small (or sometimes extremely long) journey of somebody's life and I found myself getting increasingly invested. The way it time skips towards the end of some stories is particularly lovely. The Withered Arm and Fellow-Townsmen are likely my two favourites. I'm excited to read another short story collection by Hardy next. I just love how his focus on topics and characters is rather sprawling here and don't wish to be stuck in just one world by him quite yet.
A cracking introduction to Thomas Hardy. I'm a big fan of how empathetic the stories are. They all take you on a small (or sometimes extremely long) journey of somebody's life and I found myself getting increasingly invested. The way it time skips towards the end of some stories is particularly lovely. The Withered Arm and Fellow-Townsmen are likely my two favourites. I'm excited to read another short story collection by Hardy next. I just love how his focus on topics and characters is rather sprawling here and don't wish to be stuck in just one world by him quite yet.
Want to read
October 30, 2022Selection of short stories from Thomas Hardy
1. The 3 strangers -written in late 19th century but set in early part of century. A shepherd and his wife are having a celebration with their friends for their daughters christening. They live very remote, far from the town and the night is very rainy. During the evening 3 separate strangers arrive seeking shelter/directions. One is a hangman come to do his job next morning. Who are the others? Are they connected? Good insight into rural hospitality and lifestyle. A twist at the end which I did infact guess. 3.5 stars.
1. The 3 strangers -written in late 19th century but set in early part of century. A shepherd and his wife are having a celebration with their friends for their daughters christening. They live very remote, far from the town and the night is very rainy. During the evening 3 separate strangers arrive seeking shelter/directions. One is a hangman come to do his job next morning. Who are the others? Are they connected? Good insight into rural hospitality and lifestyle. A twist at the end which I did infact guess. 3.5 stars.
July 20, 2022
Odd picking this up in Menorca on holiday when Hardy’s home is in my old stomping grounds of Dorset in England but so pleased to have done so. It’s my second book of Hardy’s that I’ve read now and have a better grasp of his prose that has formed a positive connection.
Beautifully written short stories on the country ways of living in the 1800s.
Beautifully written short stories on the country ways of living in the 1800s.
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