New edition with introduction by Linda Shires. Part of the Penguin Classics Hardy promotion.

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Adventuress and opportunist, Ethelberta reinvents herself to disguise her humble origins, launching a brilliant career as a society poet in London with her family acting incognito as her servants. Turning the male-dominated literary world to her advantage, she happily exploits the attentions of four very different suitors. Will she bestow her hand upon the richest of them, or on the man she loves? Ethelberta Petherwin, alias Berta Chickerel, moves with easy grace between her multiple identities, cleverly managing a tissue of lies to aid her meteoric rise. In The Hand of Ethelberta (1876), Hardy drew on conventions of popular romances, illustrated weeklies, plays, fashion plates and even his wife's diary in this comic story of a woman in control of her destiny.

(Book Jacket Status: Not Jacketed)

Set in the secluded forest community of Little Hintock, Thomas Hardy’s The Woodlanders inextricably links the dramatic English landscape with the story of a woman caught between two rivals of radically different social statures. Grace Melbury is promised to her longtime companion, Giles Winterborne, a local woodlander and a gentle, steadfast man. When her socially motivated father pressures her to wed the ambitious doctor Edred Fitzpiers, Grace’s loyalties shift—and her decision leads to tumultuous consequences. With its explorations of class and gender, lust and betrayal, The Woodlanders is one of Hardy’s most vivid and powerful works.

This Modern Library Paperback Classic is set from the text of the 1912 Wessex edition and includes Hardy’s map of fictional Wessex.

This 1886 novel may be Hardy's most intense and gripping narrative. We first see the central character, Michael Henchard, as a drunken and unemployed hay-trusser who sells his wife Susan and his daughter Elizabeth-Jane at a fair. When he is eventually reunited with the two, he has become the contented and prosperous mayor of a thriving market town. But the downward spiral begins. Henchard's fall is hastened by a series of coincidences and quarrels, and by his own jealousy and pride. Though the perspective on events that Hardy gives us is often that of other characters (Elizabeth-Jane in particular), Henchard remains the central focus; in the end he is a tragic figure, bankrupt, emotionally broken and a outcast from society.Prepared by one of the world's leading Hardy scholars, this edition includes a critical introduction and a range of background materials from the period. Historical documents (concerning such topics as the corn laws and the practice of wife-selling) and contemporary reviews help set this remarkable novel in the context out of which it emerged.

'La sedotta Tess, questa bellissima campagnola discendente da un'antica stirpe che le ha lasciato nel sangue i suoi possenti e persino crudeli fermenti, è vittima di un destino che si accanisce senza pace contro di lei che chiede pace. La bellezza che la natura le ha data per i suoi fini di procreazione è la sua rovina, il mezzo della sua distruzione e quando ella, in un momento di ribellione, uccide, finisce per uccidere se stessa, ormai vittima predestinata scelta a proprio divertimento dal Presidente degli Immortali'. (Dalla prefazione di Aurelio Zanco).

E' la storia di Jude Fawley, un ragazzo di campagna che ama studiare e sogna di entrare all'università di Christminster (Oxford), ma non può permettersi neppure di andare a scuola. Dopo un matrimonio fallito a cui era stato costretto con l'inganno, si trasferisce a Christminster. Lavora come scalpellino restaurando le facciate di quegli stessi collegi universitari ai quali gli è negato l'accesso, e conosce la cugina Sue Bridehead, una giovane colta e emancipata di cui s'innamora subito. Sue sposa un anziano maestro di scuola, pur non amandolo, e quando decide di abbandonarlo e di andare a vivere con Jude, lo fa tra dubbi e sensi di colpa. La loro convivenza sarà osteggiata dalla società, che rifiuterà a Jude un lavoro, e non potrà non finire in tragedia.

From its spectacular opening–the astonishing scene in which drunken Michael Henchard sells his wife and daughter to a passing sailor at a county fair–to the breathtaking series of discoveries at its conclusion, The Mayor of Casterbridge claims a unique place among Thomas Hardy's finest and most powerful novels.

Rooted in an actual case of wife-selling in early nineteenth-century England, the story build into an awesome Sophoclean drama of guilt and revenge, in which the strong, willful Henchard rises to a position of wealth and power–only to suffer a most bitter downfall. Proud, obsessed, ultimately committed to his own destruction, Henchard is, as Albert Guerard has said, “Hardy's Lord Jim…his only tragic hero and one of the greatest tragic heroes in all fiction.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

Thomas Hardy's almost supernatural insight into the course of wayward lives, his instinctive feeling for the beauty of the rural landscape, and his power to invest that landscape with moral significance all came together in an utterly fluent way in The Mayor of Casterbridge. A classically shaped story about the rise and fall of the brooding and sometimes brutal Michael Henchard in the harsh world of nineteenth-century rural England, The Mayor of Casterbridge is an emblematic product of Hardy's maturity–vigorous, forceful, and unclouded by illusions.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)

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 the ensuing century, nothing about Hardy's masterpiece has lost its power to shock us and disturb our dreams.