Short stories
Hardy was prolific not only as a Novelist and as a Poet but also as a writer of Short Stories. He began publishing Short Stories in periodicals in 1874 and continued to do so for over thirty years in total over fifty Short Stories, ranging from the brief narratives of his A Few Crusted Characters group stories told by the occupants of a carriers van as they were driven from Casterbridge to Weatherbury, to the long novella The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid.
He published the main body of his Short Stories in three volumes Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891) and Lifes Little Ironies (1894), collecting the remaining stories under the title A Changed Man and Other Tales in 1913. Unlike anything else Hardy wrote A Group of Noble Dames is a story cycle in which the speakers, forced indoors by inclement weather, tell tales of the eighteenthcentury Dorset aristocracy.
A close kinship exists between Hardys Short Stories, his Novels and his narrative poems the plot of many of his short stories would readily expand to fill a complete novel; the stories are thus a condensed but more intense version of the novels and as such give a fascinating prcis of Hardys outlook upon and understanding of the world - in which psychological factors are pre-eminent.
This section of the website contains the full text of all of Hardys four books of Short Stories, with the tales of A Few Crusted Characters presented as a single continuous narrative. An additional fifth folder contains Hardys Uncollected and Collaborative Stories.
Hardy wrote in 1893:
A story must be exceptional enough to justify the telling. We tale-tellers are all ancient Mariners, and none of us is warranted in stopping Wedding Guests (in other words, the hurrying public) unless he has something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man & woman.
Read on and judge for yourselves!
Tony Fincham 03.02.2019
Wessex tales
A Group of Noble Dames
Life's Little Ironies
A Changed Man and other tales
Uncollected and Collaborative Stories
Starts 09:00 until 18:00
Starts 12:00
Starts 12:00 until 19:30
Starts 12:00 until 14:00
