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    Under the Greenwood Tree
    Under the Greenwood Tree
    Under the Greenwood Tree
    Audiobook6 hours

    Under the Greenwood Tree

    Written by Thomas Hardy

    Narrated by Peter Joyce

    3.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    A wonderfully evocative tale of the courtship of Fancy Day, newly arrived schoolmistress, by Dick Dewy, carrier of goods, during the four seasons of one year in Wessex.

    Most of Hardy’s work had tragedy woven into the narrative but Under the Greenwood Tree is full of whimsy and good humour. The story is not without its serious comment, however, as Hardy reflects on class division and the disappearance of heritage in the rural community.

    Parson Maybold, a rival for Fancy’s hand, has plans to install a mechanical organ in his church thereby replacing the services of the choir. The village rustics, who resent this intrusion, bring much comedy to the tale and were such a successful addition that the author used the idea in several of his later works.

    The book is Hardy’s most appealing statement revealing his respect and reverence for musical tradition, the countryside and the simple nature of the people who inhabited its fragile communities.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAssembled Stories
    Release dateApr 29, 2007
    ISBN9781860152801
    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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