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    Wessex Tales
    Wessex Tales
    Wessex Tales
    Audiobook10 hours

    Wessex Tales

    Written by Thomas Hardy

    Narrated by Neville Jason

    4/5

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    About this audiobook

    Wessex Tales, a collection of short stories including The Three Strangers, The Withered Arm and The Distracted Preacher, deals with a number of timeless themes seen so often in Hardy’s work; marriage, class, revenge and disappointed love. Many of the tales have a supernatural tinge, and all are set around Hardy’s much loved homeland.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJun 1, 2012
    ISBN9781843795841
    Author

    Thomas Hardy

    Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840, the eldest of four children. At the age of sixteen he became an apprentice architect. With remarkable self discipline he developed his classical education by studying between the hours of four and eight in the morning. With encouragement from Horace Moule of Queens' College Cambridge, he began to write fiction. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. Thus began a series of increasingly dark novels all set within the rural landscape of his native Dorset, called Wessex in the novels. Such was the success of his early novels, including A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), that he gave up his work as an architect to concentrate on his writing. However he had difficulty in getting Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1889) published and was forced to make changes in order for it to be judged suitable for family readers. This coupled with the stormy reaction to the negative tone of Jude the Obscure (1894) prompted Hardy to abandon novel writing altogether. He concentrated mainly on poetry in his latter years. He died in January 1928 and was buried in Westminster Abbey; but his heart, in a separate casket, was buried in Stinsford, Dorset.

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    Reviews for Wessex Tales

    4/5

    76 ratings6 reviews

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    • 2/5
      Narrator is perfect. Writing isn’t my favorite Hardy. The recording has errors and skips in it.
    • 2/5
      This recording is entirely asynchronous, with some of the stories ending abruptly mid-sentence and others beginning in media res. I would have loved to have listened to this text had it been uploaded correctly. It was terribly frustrating to dive deep into one tale never to learn of the ending. Several passages were repeated more than once under the guise of different chapters. A complete mess. So disappointing
    • 4/5
      I think what impresses me most in Thomas Hardy's writing is how real the characters and setting become to me, particularly in his longer length stories.My copy of this collection has 7 stories as was published in the 1919 edition. They were written for magazines between 1879 and 1890. These seem like folk tales written by Hardy to capture stories heard in his youth or told to him. How much of this may be sheer invention is not known to me. I assume most. I read about one a day which gave me time to think about each one and reflect upon the lives and sadness that Hardy relates.The first two stories although quite atmospheric are not what I think of as great Thomas Hardy. With the third story Hardy revs it up and many of these stories are set in and around Casterbridge.I would think that Hardy has few equals in telling a sad story. A good example would be the third tale here, a story of the farm girl Phyllis and the German soldier Matthäus Tina who but for a moment brightened each others dismal lives in 1801 in "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion" before falling further into sadness and despair and death. So the fourth story, "The Withered Arm" is something of a horror story and manages to be even sadder by the end. But it is fascinating in the telling.If I was hoping that the fifth story, Fellow-Townsmen, might give me a break from melancholy, I would have been disappointed. In painting a portrait of life in the mid 1800's Hardy once again delivers the goods that life is full of sadness and misfortune. To make sure you don't have even have more than a glimpse of happiness, the one happy family in the story is shattered by death. Even to the last few sentences where one hopes for a bit of better, Hardy leads us on to more disappointment.The sixth story "Interlopers at the Knap" is another take by Hardy on the theme we have just experienced in the prior stories, that of marrying the wrong girl and or not marrying the right girl when you had the chance. Not quite as good as the middle stories but still a very atmospheric read.The final story felt different than the others and gives us a new portrait of village life in the 1830's and the always present theme of romance. I particularly like an afterword by the author to this story that was first published in April 1879. In May 1912 Hardy writes that the ending of the story was almost de rigueur in an English magazine at the time of the writing. "But at this late date, thirty years after, it may not be amiss to give the ending that would have been preferred by the writer" and then he does. I won't give it away because one never knows how a hardy story will end, but I can see both endings and the original is fine.
    • 3/5
      Some tales this collection work well, some don’t, while a couple fall somewhere in between. Still, if you like Thomas Hardy, it’s certainly worth a read.
    • 3/5
      Not quite as depressing in short story form as in long form, but not exactly an uplifting set of takes either...
    • 5/5
      Preparing for a trip to South-West England I have lately been reading and watching Thomas Hardy material. His Wessex Stories, a series of magazine short stories, are brilliant, what a story teller he is, these are not your average run-of-the-mill stories, instead Hardy manages to create many-faceted characters even in his short stories, in vivid landscapes, lots of twists-of-the-tale, and very little moralising, except what comes with the time the stories are written and for what purpose they were written. It is funny to read Hardy's notes to the last short story, where he ostensibly has been forced to write a moralising ending that he disagrees with. I enjoyed every single one of the short stories, too bad he didn't write so many others. Look forward to reading his novels.