This is the annotated edition including a rare biographical essay on the life and works of the author. This compilation of Thomas Hardy's short stories is one of the most complete on the book market. Every single story was tracked down and integrated into this book. Hours of enjoyable reading lies ahead of you because Hardy was a real genius among the English fiction writers. From the contents: A Changed Man The Waiting Supper Alicia's Diary The Grave By The Handpost Enter A Dragoon A Tryst At An Ancient Earth Work What The Shepherd Saw: A Tale Of Four Moonlight Nights A Committee-Man Of 'The Terror' Master John Horseleigh, Knight The Duke's Reappearance—A Family Tradition A Mere Interlude The First Countess Of Wessex Barbara Of The House Of Grebe The Marchioness Of Stonehenge Lady Mottisfont The Lady Icenway Squire Petrick's Lady Anna, Lady Baxby The Lady Penelope The Duchess Of Hamptonshire The Honourable Laura The Son's Veto For Conscience' Sake A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions On The Western Circuit To Please His Wife The Melancholy Hussar Of The German Legion The Fiddler Of The Reels A Tradition Of Eighteen Hundred And Four A Few Crusted Characters Tony Kytes, The Arch-Deceiver The History Of The Hardcomes The Superstitious Man's Story Andrey Satchel And The Parson And Clerk Old Andrey's Experience As A Musician Absent-Mindedness In A Parish Choir The Winters And The Palmleys Incident In The Life Of Mr. George Crookhill Netty Sargent's Copyhold An Imaginative Woman The Three Strangers ... and many more ...

This selection was the third that Hardy collected together himself for publication as a single volume. It reflects the experiences of a novelist who was at the height of his creative powers. The stories are thematically linked by a concern with the diverse problems of marriage.

Thomas Hardy penned nearly fifty short stories, but in spite of this impressive number, his contributions to the genre have been relatively understudied. Bringing together an international group of scholars, this is the first edited collection devoted solely to Hardy's works of short fiction. The contributors take up topics related to their publication in periodicals, gender and community relationships, and narrative techniques. Taken together, the essays show that Hardy's short stories are important, not only for what they tell us about Hardy as a writer who straddles the divide between the traditionalist and the modernist, but also for how they reflect and inform the period in which he wrote.

"See if she is dark or fair, and if you can, notice if her hands be white; if not, see if they look as though she had ever done housework, or are milker's hands like mine." So Rhoda Brook, the abandoned mistress of Farmer Lodge, is jealous to discover details of his new bride in 'The Withered Arm', the title story in this selection of Hardy's finest short stories. Hardy's first story, 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak' was written fresh from the success of Far From the Madding Crowd. Beautiful in their own right, these stories are also testing-grounds for the novels in their controversial sexual politics, their refusal of romance structures, and their elegiac pursuit of past, lost loves. 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.

This is a short story written by Thomas Hardy was published in Wessex. This tells of a woman, a wife and a mother who aspires to be a poet and who falls in love with a male poet she never meets. As a Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, Thomas Hardy was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society.

A Changed Man and Other Tales is a collection of twelve tales written by Thomas Hardy. The collection was originally published in book form in 1913, although all of the tales had been previously published in newspapers or magazines from 1881 to 1900.There are eleven short stories and a novella The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. At the end of the book there is a map of the imaginary Wessex of Hardy's novels and poems. Six of the stories were published before 1891 and therefore lacked international copyright protection when the collection began to be sold in October 1913.[