Science and romance are destined to collide, however, as work, ambition and the pressures of the outside world intrude upon the pair. In what Sally Shuttleworth calls 'a drama of oppositions and conflicts', Hardy's story sets male desire against female constancy, and 'describes an arc across the horizon of late nineteenth-century social and cultural concerns: sexuality, class, history, science and religion'.

Several of the stories in The Withered Arm were collected to form the famous volume, Wessex Tales (1888), the first time Hardy denoted 'Wessex' to describe his fictional world. The Withered Arm is the first of a new two-volume selection of Hardy's short stories, edited with an introduction and notes by Kristin Brady.

'You are ambitious, Eustacia – no not exactly ambitious, luxurious. I ought to be of the same vein, to make you happy, I suppose'

Tempestuous Eustacia Vye passes her days dreaming of passionate love and the escape it may bring from the small community of Egdon Heath.  Hearing that Clym Yeobright is to return from Paris, she sets her heart on marrying him, believing that through him she can leave rural life and find fulfilment elsewhere. But she is to be disappointed, for Clym has dreams of his own, and they have little in common with Eustacia's. Their unhappy marriage causes havoc in the lives of those close to them, in particular Damon Wildeve, Eustacia's former lover, Clym's mother and his cousin Thomasin. The Return of the Native illustrates the tragic potential of romantic illusion and how its protagonists fail to recognize their opportunities to control their own destinies.

Penny Boumelha's introduction examines the classical and mythological references and the interplay of class and sexuality in the novel. This edition, essentially Hardy's original book version of the novel, also includes notes, a glossary, chronology and bibliography.

Under the Greenwood Tree is Thomas Hardy's one and only rural idyll, a startling contrast to his other Wessex tales. In Mellstock, its surrounding farms and woodlands, the story interweaves the lingering courtship of Dick Dewy and sweet Fancy Day with the battle for survival of the old Mellstock String Choir – the last in the county – against the mechanical church organ of the new vicar, the Reverend Maybold.

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.

This new Penguin Classics edition, based on the two-volume first edition of 1872, includes Appendices which reflect the unique textual history of the novel.

Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Tim Dolin

In writing of this poignant struggle between classes and sexes, Hardy drew heavily on his own relationships with his family, fiancée, and closest friend. In the Introduction to this new edition, Pamela Dalziel discovers fascinating parallels between Hardy's life and his art, and probes the paradoxes lying behind his portrayal of these complex characters and the society which shapes them.

'I'm an outsider to the end of my days!'

Jude Fawley's hopes of a university education are lost when he is trapped into marrying the earthy Arabella, who later abandons him. Moving to the town of Christminster where he finds work as a stonemason, Jude meets and falls in love with his cousin Sue Bridehead, a sensitive, freethinking 'New Woman'. Refusing to marry merely for the sake of religious convention, Jude and Sue decide instead to live together, but they are shunned by society and poverty soon threatens to ruin them. Jude the Obscure, Hardy's last novel, caused a public furor when it was first published, with its fearless and challenging exploration of class and sexual relationships.

This edition uses the unbowdlerized text of the first volume edition of 1895, and also includes a list for further reading, appendices and a glossary. In his introduction, Dennis Taylor examines biblical allusions and the critique of religion in Jude the Obscure, and its critical reception that led Hardy to abandon novel writing.

Blackmail, murder and romance are among the ingredients of Hardy's first published novel, and in it he draws blithely on the 'sensation novel' perfected by Wilkie Collins. Several perceptive critics praised the author as a novelist with a future when Desperate Remedies appeared anonymously in 1871. In its depiction of country life and insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy's genius.