When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D'Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her 'cousin' Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love and salvation, but Tess must choose whether to reveal her past or remain silent in the hope of a...more
This brilliant full-cast BBC Radio dramatization stars Claire Rushbrook, James D'Arcy, and Adam Godley. When John Durbeyfield learns that he is descended from ancient Norman stock, he and his wife encourage their daughter Tess to befriend the neighboring family of Stoke-d'Urbervilles. Their charming but self-centered son Alec is frustrated by her l...more
Because of its frank treatment of human sexuality and its unflinching fatalism, Jude the Obscure aroused such a storm of controversy upon its publication in 1895 that, partly in response, Thomas Hardy abandoned the art of novel-writing altogether and devoted the rest of his life to poetry. Though we have come a long way in our social attitudes in ...more
Hardy's novel begins with the famous scene in which Michael Henchard, a young farmer, gets drunk at a village fair and sells his wife and baby daughter to a passing sailor for five guineas. The consequences of this impulsive act are regrettable and far-reaching, and culminate in Henchard's ruin and his death in obscurity as a lonely old man. Hencha...more
After an unfortunate marriage to Sergeant Troy and an affair with Farmer Boldwood, Bathsheba Everdene finally becomes the wife of the man who has always loved her, in an authoritative edition of the uncensored 1912 text. Reprint.
Because of its sexual frankness and indictment of Victorian hypocrisy, Hardy's novel was considered shocking when it was published in 1891. It is the tale of Tess Durbeyfield, a young country girl whose rape by Alec D'Urberville, a distant aristocratic relative, leads to pregnancy. Tess's baby dies, and she finds work as a dairymaid at a farm where...more
Under the Greenwood Tree interweaves the lingering courtship of Dick Dewy and sweet Fancy Day with the battle for survival of the old string choir -- the last in the county -- against the mechanical church organ of the new vicar. Set amid the farms and woodlands of Mellstock, this sunlit and good-humored pastoral romance came to epitomize for Hardy...more
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