Showing results by author "Thomas Hardy" in All Categories

Twelve dramatisations of the best love stories ever written, performed by star casts Treat yourself to this stunning collection of classic stories of love, loss, obstacles overcome and desperate attraction. This is a beautiful, moving and at times thrilling listen which takes you on a journey...

Tess Durbeyfield has become one of the most famous female protagonists in 19th-century British literature. Betrayed by the two men in her life - Alec D’Urberville, her seducer/rapist and father of her fated child; and Angel, her intellectual and pious husband - Tess takes justice, and her own destiny, into her delicate hands. In telling her desperate and passionate story, Hardy brings Tess to life with an extraordinary vividness that makes her live in the heart of the reader long after the novel is concluded.

Penguin Classics presents Thomas Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, adapted for audio and now available as a digital download as part of the Penguin English Library series. Read by the actress Julie Christie. Hardy's powerful novel of swift sexual passion and slow-burning loyalty centres on...

Set in Hardy's Wessex, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, "A Pure Woman", infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic. The novel tells the story of Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of a poor and dissipated villager, who learns that she may be descended from the ancient family of d'Urbeville.

William Collins Books and Decca Records are proud to present ARGO Classics, a historic catalogue of classic fiction read by some of the world’s most renowned voices. Originally released as vinyl records, these expertly abridged and remastered stories are now available to download for the first...

Richard Burton, the multi-award winning actor, reads the finest work of Thomas Hardy.

The British Classics Collection – Volume 2 steps into the grand world of 18th, 19th, and 20th-century British literature to create a compelling anthology featuring iconic works that span time and genres. From the whimsy of Alice in Wonderland to the mystery of The Woman in White, the philosophical insights of The Waste Land and the unforgettable detective stories of Sherlock Holme, this volume offers a rich variety of British literary masterpieces.

This is a diverting delight, a window on romance in literature. There are high lovers and low lovers, tragic lovers, comic lovers, and lovers who shouldn’t be doing what they are doing at all and certainly not then and there. There is even Fanny Hill trying not to discover what physical love is about when set upon by an old roué who has paid for the privilege. Though of special interest for lovers and their special lover’s day of St. Valentine, it is an amusing and sometimes surprising collection.

One of the most popular of Hardy’s novels, this charming pastoral idyll is a lightly humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. Drawn from Hardy’s childhood memories, it represents, he said, “a true picture at first hand of the personages, ways, and customs which were common in the villages.”

In the midst of bombs and bullets, trenches and trauma, the soldiers of World War I, and those observing the horrors taking place from home, took pen to paper to record their experiences in verse. These poems - considered the greatest written during WWI and some of the greatest poetry of the twentieth century - show the horror of war but also shine a light on the strength of human courage, bravery, and virtue.

Hardy’s favourite of his own novels; a powerful work with brooding sexual undertones, ahead of its time in addressing themes of divorce, social inequality and land tenure. Now a film starring Rufus Sewell. Grace Melbury, the only daughter of a timber-merchant, arrives home in Little Hintock...

A great collection of 12 classic stories about ghosts and the supernatural. Included are stories by Thomas Hardy, Fitz-James O'Brien, and Margaret Oliphant. Recommended for fans of classic ghost stories of yesteryear. - Summary by Phyllis Vincelli

A glittering collection of some of the world's finest short stories.

Drunk on rum at a country fair, Henchard sells his wife to a sailor for five guineas. Unable to find them and overcome with guilt and remorse he vows to be teetotal for 21 years. Many years later his wife seeks him out in Casterbridge, where he has gained both wealth and the well respected position of mayor.

Thomas Hardy's sinister tale of jealousy, unrequited love and a mysterious and hideous curse. When Farmer Lodge brings his new wife home, nobody is more resentful and yet curious about her than his spurned former lover, Rhoda Brooke. But a terrifying and supernatural nightmare in which the two women fight, leaves strange and sinister marks on the young wife's arm. Over the weeks and months that follow, the arm begins to wither and wrinkle.

Hardy’s classic ‘pastoral tale’ of wilful and capricious Bathsheba Everdene and her three suitors, the faithful shepherd, the lonely widower and the dashing but faithless soldier. An immediate success when it was first published in 1874, Thomas Hardy’s ‘pastoral tale’ of the wilful...

Dance with a lobster, telephone an elephant or knock on a moonlit door - this collection includes magical, macabre, dramatic, funny, bizarre, absurd, delightful, moving and charming poems by Lewis Carroll, A.A. Milne, Edward Lear, Hilaire Belloc, Kenneth Grahame and many others. Readers such as Anton Lesser, Simon Russell-Beale and Timothy West bring the lines beautifully to life and make this an ideal introduction to some of the best-loved children's poetry.

Socially critical and emotionally complex, Tess of the d'Urbervilles is Hardy's masterpiece. It tells the story of Tess Durbeyfield, forced by her family's poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy d'Urbervilles. Violated by the son, Alec, her hopes of rebuilding her life with the gentle and bookish Angel Clare founder when he learns of her past.

Set against the backdrop of peaceful southwest England, where Thomas Hardy spent much of his youth, The Mayor of Casterbridge captures the author's unique genius for depicting the absurdity underlying much of the sorrow and humor in our lives. Michael Henchard is an out-of-work hay-trusser who gets drunk at a local fair and impulsively sells his wife, Susan, and baby daughter.

Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow, A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new - from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s "Christmas in India", from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to Laurie Lee’s "Cider with Rosie".