Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain such as those from his native South West England.
Alice Adams is a 1921 novel by Booth Tarkington that received the 1922 Pulitzer Prize for the Novel. It was adapted as a film in 1923 by Rowland V. Lee and more famously in 1935 by George Stevens. The narrative centers on the character of a young woman who aspires to climb the social ladder and win the affections of a wealthy young man named Arthur Russell. The story is set in a lower-middle-class household in an unnamed town in the Midwest shortly after World War I.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles: A Pure Woman is the twelfth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy. It initially appeared in a censored and serialised version, published by the British illustrated newspaper The Graphic in 1891, then in book form in three volumes in 1891, and as a single volume in 1892. Although now considered a major novel of the 19th century, Tess of the d'Urbervilles received mixed reviews when it first appeared, in part because it challenged the sexual morals of late Victorian England.
Jude the Obscure is the thirteenth published novel by English author Thomas Hardy, which began as a magazine serial in December 1894 and was first published in book form in 1895. It is Hardy's last completed novel. The protagonist, Jude Fawley, is a working-class young man; he is a stonemason who dreams of becoming a scholar. The other main character is his cousin, Sue Bridehead, who is also his central love interest. The novel is concerned in particular with issues of class, education, religion, morality and marriage.
The Woman Who Did (1895) is a novel by Grant Allen about a young, self-assured middle-class woman who defies convention as a matter of principle and who is fully prepared to suffer the consequences of her actions. It was first published in London by John Lane in a series intended to promote the ideal of the "New Woman". It was adapted into a British silent film in 1915, The Woman Who Did, which was directed by Walter West, and later into a 1925 German film, Die Frau mit dem schlechten Ruf.
Persuasion is the last novel completed by the English author Jane Austen. It was published on 20 December 1817, along with Northanger Abbey, six months after her death, although the title page is dated 1818.
The Age of Innocence is a novel by American author Edith Wharton, published on 25 October 1920. It was her eighth novel, and was initially serialized in 1920 in four parts, in the magazine Pictorial Review. Later that year, it was released as a book by D. Appleton & Company. It won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making Wharton the first woman to win the prize. Though the committee had initially agreed to give the award to Sinclair Lewis for Main Street, the judges, in rejecting his book on political grounds, "established Wharton as the American 'First Lady of Letters'". The story is set in the 1870s, in upper-class, "Gilded Age" New York City. Wharton wrote the book in her 50s, after she was already established as a major author in high demand by publishers.
Shirley, A Tale is an 1849 social novel by the English novelist Charlotte Brontë. It was Brontë's second published novel after Jane Eyre. The novel is set in Yorkshire in 1811–12, during the industrial depression resulting from the Napoleonic Wars and the War of 1812. The novel is set against the backdrop of the Luddite uprisings in the Yorkshire textile industry.
Hard Times: For These Times is the tenth novel by English author Charles Dickens, first published in 1854. The book surveys English society and satirises the social and economic conditions of the era.
The Woodlanders is the eleventh published novel by English author Thomas Hardy. The novel is set between 1856 and 1858. It was serialised from 15 May 1886 to 9 April 1887 in Macmillan's Magazine and published in three volumes in 1887. It is one of his series of Wessex novels.
The Moving Finger is a detective novel by British writer Agatha Christie, first published in the USA by Dodd, Mead and Company in July 1942 and in the UK by the Collins Crime Club in June 1943. The US edition retailed at $2.00 and the UK edition at seven shillings and sixpence.
The Angel in the House is a narrative poem by Coventry Patmore, first published in 1854 and expanded until 1862. Although largely ignored upon publication, it became enormously popular in the United States during the later 19th century and then in Britain, and its influence continued well into the twentieth century as it became part of many English Literature courses once adopted by W. W. Norton & Company into The Norton Anthology of English Literature. The poem was an idealised account of Patmore's courtship of his first wife, Emily Augusta Andrews (1824–1862), whom he married in 1847 and believed to be the perfect woman. According to Carol Christ, it is not a very good poem, "yet it is culturally significant, not only for its definition of the sexual ideal, but also for the clarity with which it represents the male concerns that motivate fascination with that ideal."
Egdon Heath is a fictitious area of Thomas Hardy's Wessex inhabited sparsely by the people who cut the furze (gorse) that grows there. The entire action of Hardy's novel The Return of the Native takes place on Egdon Heath, and it also features in The Mayor of Casterbridge and the short story The Withered Arm (1888). The area is rife with witchcraft and superstition.
The Rescue, A Romance of the Shallows (1920) is one of Joseph Conrad's works contained in what is now sometimes called the Lingard Trilogy, a group of novels based on Conrad's experience as mate on the steamer Vidar. Although it was the last of the three novels to be published, after Almayer's Folly (1895) and An Outcast of the Islands (1896), the events related in the novel precede those. The story follows Captain Tom Lingard, the recurring protagonist of The Lingard Trilogy, who was on his way to help a native friend regain his land when he falls in love with a married woman whose yacht he saves from foundering.
"A Tragedy of Two Ambitions" is a short story by Thomas Hardy and was published in his collection Life's Little Ironies in 1894.
Hobomok, A Tale of Early Times. is a novel by the nineteenth-century American author and human rights campaigner Lydia Maria Child. Her first novel, published in 1824 under the pseudonym "An American", was inspired by John G. Palfrey's article in the North American Review. The novel is set during the late 1620s and 1630s. Among other themes, it relates the marriage of a recently immigrated white American woman, Mary Conant, to the eponymous Native American and her attempt to raise their son in white society.
Egdon Heath, Op. 47, H. 172, subtitled "A Homage to Thomas Hardy", is a tone poem by Gustav Holst, written in 1927. Holst considered it his most perfectly realised composition.
Gertrude Bugler was a British stage actress of the Edwardian Era best known for acting in plays adapted by Thomas Hardy.
The Natural Daughter with Portraits of the Leadenhead Family is a novel by the English poet, dramatist and novelist Mary Robinson, published in 1799 by T. N. Longman and O. Rees in Paternoster Row in London. The novel was originally published as two volumes; a thousand copies were printed for the first edition of the novel. All the copies sold out quickly, leading to the book's second publication in the same year. This romantic prose narrative is often thought to be Robinson's commentary on the French Revolution and the ideals of the English woman, due to the various characters influenced by France and the members of the revolution who appear in the novel.
The Hardy Players (1908–1928) was an amateur theatrical company, based in Dorchester, Dorset. The novelist Thomas Hardy adapted his novels for live performance in collaboration with the group. In some cases he made major changes to the story, such as changing the ending of The Trumpet Major, truncating Return of the Native and making other changes to the text to better fit dramatisation. Hardy wrote his play The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall specifically to be performed by the Hardy Players.
