Showing results by author "Hardy Thomas" in All Categories

Here is Thomas Hardy's timeless novel, read by Julie Christie. Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the best-known of Hardy's works. The story centres around the beautiful and wilful Bathsheba Everdene, mistress of Weatherbury Upper Farm, and the three men who love her. Hardy combines outstanding description of West Country rural life with a deep sense of romantic passion.

On her morning journey to earn money for her impoverished family, Tess' horse has an accident, forcing her to seek assistance from some newly rich relatives. There, she is vigorously pursued by Alec, who corners her in a field one night and takes advantage of her.

Thomas Hardy wrote this engaging seasonal story for The Father Christmas Annual in 1877, which was very early in his career. One can just imagine the family sitting by the fireside after the big Christmas lunch, and listening as one member of the family read the story (set in the Wessex countryside he knew so well). By this time, he was already making his mark as a writer. One of his greatest achievements, Far From the Madding Crowd was published three years earlier.

An interesting novel due to its depiction of a violent love/hate relationship between two men, this story highlights the strains of competition in pre-industrial rural society. Michael Henchard attains the position of town mayor, but the lies that lead him there leave the door open to a dramatic newcomer to expose his fundamental flaws.

In a fit of drunken anger, Michael Henchard sells his wife and baby daughter for five guineas at a country fair. Over the course of the following years, he manages to establish himself as a respected and prosperous pillar of the community of Casterbridge, but behind his success there always lurk the shameful secret of his past and a personality prone to self-destructive pride and temper. Hardy’s powerful and sympathetic study of the heroic but deeply flawed Henchard is also an intensely dramatic work.

Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston. Desperate Remedies contains sensational ingredients of blackmail, murder and romance, but with its insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy’s future genius.

Barbara, a young and impetuous heiress, rejects the stern Lord Uplandtowers to elope with a poor but handsome man, Edmund Willowes. When Barbara’s parents send Edmund to Europe, they hope to change him into a more suitable match for their daughter. But after disaster strikes, Edmund returns in a way nobody could have imagined.

Two on a Tower' is Hardy's ninth novel and contains perhaps his most complete treatment of the theme of love across the class and age divide, and also the fullest expression of his fascination with astronomy and science.

Michael Pennington reads the much-loved classic by Thomas Hardy. Hardy called this story "a deadly war waged between flesh and spirit". It is a tale of doomed love and unfulfilled promise that revolves around Jude Fawley, an ambitious and intelligent young man, his cousin Sue Bridehead, and his academic mentor Phillotson.

Bathsheba Everdene's three wooers, the faithful Gabriel Oak, the passionate William Boldwood and the adventurer Sergeant Troy, eventually cause madness and murder in this fatalistic novel. Hardy's writing is full of beautiful descriptions and deep wisdom.

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 near Dorchester in that part of England he called Wessex. With stories sometimes from his own imagination and sometimes from local tradition, Hardy's work, like Dickens and Trollope, creates a strong sense of mood and location. Hardy hoped to be remembered for his poetry, but ours is not a poetic age. Thus his claim to a new generation of readers rests on his prose. There are great similarities between his era, a time of challenge, and our own.

Set in Egdon Heath, a wild tract of country in the southwest of England, this is a masterpiece of dramatic tension. Clym Yeobright, a diamond merchant in Paris, returns to his home in Egdon, where he falls passionately in love with the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye. She, while in a brief state of infatuation, marries him, hoping he will take her away to a more exciting life in Paris. But Eustacia's dreams of escape are not to be realized.

Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber-merchant, arrives home in Little Hintock after an expensive education and her father looks to find a husband for her. There are two rivals for her hand: Giles Winterborne, a good-hearted yeoman and her childhood sweetheart; and Edred Fitzpiers, an ambitious young doctor of good family. Fitzpiers wins her, but the mismatch brings unhappiness not just to the young couple, but to a wider circle in the woodland community.

A pretty young girl has to leave home to make money for her family. She is clever and a good worker; but she is uneducated and does not know the cruel ways of the world. So, when a rich young man says he loves her, she is careful - but not careful enough. He is persuasive, and she is overwhelmed. It is not her fault, but the world says it is.... An Oxford Bookworms Library reader for learners of English, adapted from the Thomas Hardy original by Clare West.

An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy's "pastoral tale" of the wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene, her three suitors, the faithful shepherd Gabriel Oak, the lonely widower Farmer Boldwood, and the dashing but faithless Sergeant Troy, and the tragic consequence of her eventual choice remains one of the most enduring and popular English novels.

When a stranger turns up at Shepherd Fennel's party, held in honour of his daughter's christening, he is welcomed and treated to home-brewed mead, a pipe and tobacco and a seat by the fire. When a second, altogether more sinister stranger arrives, he too is welcomed, although he makes rather too free with the host's liquor and sings a song revealing his terrible secret. When a third stranger arrives in the midst of the second stranger's song and taking one look into the room, flees in terror, the guests are mystified.

Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native, adapted for audio and available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actor Steven Pacey. Do I desire unreasonably much in wanting what is called life - music, poetry, passion, war, and all the beating and pulsing that is going on in the great arteries of the world? Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath.

Thomas Hardy's sinister tale of jealousy, unrequited love and a mysterious and hideous curse. When Farmer Lodge brings his new wife home, nobody is more resentful and yet curious about her than his spurned former lover, Rhoda Brooke. But a terrifying and supernatural nightmare in which the two women fight, leaves strange and sinister marks on the young wife's arm. Over the weeks and months that follow, the arm begins to wither and wrinkle.

Three fine writers have created three gloriously chilling tales that will cut you to the quick. Will you be able to listen and turn out the light? Great stories, simply told with fresh voices.

Eustacia Vye is a beautiful, commanding presence on England's Egdon Heath. Her longing for the glamour of city life leaves her dissatisfied with her traditionalist husband, Clym Yeobright, and leads her to take Damon Wildeve as her lover. In a mixing of fate, chance, and human error, Eustacia's marriage smolders and explodes in violent tragedy. Set against the looming presence of the Heath, Hardy's work vividly depicts characters cruelly manipulated by the forces around them, unable to dictate their own fates. This classic story, a forerunner to the 20th-century psychological novel, is presented in unabridged form, revealing all of its poetic compassion and universal themes.