Thomas Hardy

First published serially between January and December of 1878 in the sensationalistic monthly London magazine "Belgravia", Thomas Hardy's "The Return of the Native" is the author's sixth published novel. Set in Egdon Heath, an area of Thomas Hardy's fictionalized Wessex known for the thorny evergreen shrubs, called furze or gorse, which are cut there by its residents for fuel. When the story begins, on Guy Fawkes Night, we find Diggory Venn, a merchant...

Set in the magical Wessex landscape so familiar from Thomas Hardy's early work, Tess of the D'Urbervilles is unique among his great novels for the intense feeling that he lavished upon his heroine, Tess, a pure woman betrayed by love. Hardy poured all of his profound empathy for both humanity and the rhythms of natural life into this story of her beauty, goodness, and tragic fate. In so doing, he created a character who, like Emma Bovary and Anna...

A collection of World War I poetry interpreted by cartoonists. As the Great War dragged on and its catastrophic death toll mounted, poets turned their pens to a world upside down. Many of the Trench Poets, as they came to be called, were soldier-poets dispatching their verse from the front lines. Known for their impassioned portrayals of life and death on the Western Front, these poems because, for much of the world, the literary heart of the Great...