Thomas Hardy's short stories reveal a literary persona, a creative intelligence and an imaginative vision uniquely and unmistakably his own. Those contained within this volume are among his finest and most representative and include The Withered Arm, one of his best known and most gripping; Barbara of the House of Grebe, said by T. S. Eliot to portray 'a world of pure evil The Son's Veto, regarded by Hardy as his best story; and, of course, The Distracted Preacher, possible the most flawless of all. Like the novels, the short stories reveal Hardy's preoccupation with affairs of the heart, with love requited and frustrated, fulfilled or doomed. They contain many of his most powerful portraits of women; they are streaked with the grotesque, the macabre and bizarre; and they are permeated by that atmosphere, narrative power, and vivid sense of place and its intimate relation to character which are the essentials of Hardy's genius.
Esta es la historia de un doble fracaso: el de un ideal de pareja fuera del derecho de familia. Novela fuerte y dura que, pese a la densidad de su entramado conceptual, entra de lleno en el modelo de relato realista. En el momento de su publicacion en 1895 fue la primera novela que expuso claramente y sin tapujos la cuestion de las relaciones sexuales como un problema filosofico y vital abierto al debate publico, cuestion que causo un gran escandalo y Thomas Hardy fue duramente atacado.
Under the Greenwood Tree appears to be pastoral romance at its most sunlit and good humoured, and has been called the 'most nearly flawless of Hardy's novels'. Yet, as Tim Dolin shows in his Introduction, there is a darker side to this paradise, seen particularly in the conflicts arising over anachronistic customs and rituals, and the ambiguities surrounding Fancy's forthcoming marriage. For Hardy, who drew out the associations with his own childhood in later revisions, the novel came to epitomize a past that had been forever lost to him and to England.
«El alcalde de Casterbridge» (1886) es una de las novelas de madurez de Thomas Hardy y, junto con «Jude el oscuro», una de las que cimentan su histórica fama de novelista trágico. «El alcalde de Cast
The books were written one before and one after his 'last' novel, Jude the Obscure (1895). Both stories are richly ambiguous but the first shows the successful exercise of masculine power and the second shows women triumphant. The double work, coming at the end of Hardy's long career as a novelist, anticipates modernist writing by offering not merely alternative endings but alternative plots. This edition is the first to provide both separate texts and separate commentaries.
