An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories

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An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories Pub. Date: 6/28/1999 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

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An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories Pub. Date: 2/9/1995 Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

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Overview

This edition brings together ten stories never before collected that show the range and experimentation in Hardy's technique and subject matter as never before. In addition to the title story, derived from Hardy's unpublished first novel, this volume includes How I Built Myself a House, Destiny and a Blue Cloak, Our Exploits at West Poley, Old Mrs Chundle, The Doctor's Legend, The Spectre of the Real, Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer, and The Unconquerable. With an insightful introduction, this edition takes the reader beyond the usual Hardy canon.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780192823441
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date: 2/9/1995
Edition number: 1
Pages: 312
Series: World's Classics Series
Product dimensions: 4.38 (w) x 7.38 (h) x 0.53 (d)

Meet the Author

Thomas Hardy

Victorian novelist and poet Thomas Hardy focused much of his work -- including classics like Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) on man's futile struggle against unseen forces. Of his rather unromantic outlook on life, Hardy once said, "Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed."

Biography

Thomas Hardy was born on June 2, 1840, in the village of Higher Bockhampton, near Dorchester, a market town in the county of Dorset. Hardy would spend much of his life in his native region, transforming its rural landscapes into his fictional Wesses. Hardy's mother, Jemima, inspired him with a taste for literature, while his stonemason father, Thomas, shared with him a love of architecture and music (the two would later play the fiddle at local dances). As a boy Hardy read widely in the popular fiction of the day, including the novels of Scott, Dumas, Dickens, W. Harrison Ainsworth, and G.P.R. James, and in the poetry of Scott, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and others. Strongly influenced in his youth by the Bible and the liturgy of the Anglican Church, Hardy later contemplated a career in the ministry; but his assimilation of the new theories of Darwinian evolutionism eventually made him an agnostic and a severe critic of the limitations of traditional religion.

Although Hardy was a gifted student at the local schools he attended as a boy for eight years, his lower-class social origins limited his further educational opportunities. At sixteen, he was apprenticed to architect James Hicks in Dorchester and began an architectural career primarily focused on the restoration of churches. In Dorchester Hardy was also befriended by Horace Moule, eight years Hardy's senior, who acted as an intellectual mentor and literary adviser throughout his youth and early adulthood. From 1862 to 1867 hardy worked in London for the distinguished architect Arthur Blomfeld, but he continued to study -- literature, art, philosophy, science, history, the classics -- and to write, first poetry and then fiction.

In the early 1870s Hardy's first two published novels, Desperate Remedies and Under the Greenwood Tree, appeared to little acclaim or sales. With his third novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, he began the practice of serializing his fiction in magazines prior to book publication, a method that he would utilize throughout his career as a novelist. In 1874, the year of his marriage to Emma Gifford of St. Juliot, Cornwall, Hardy enjoyed his first significant commercial and critical success with the book publication of Far from the Madding Crowd after its serialization in the Cornhill Magazine. Hardy and his wife lived in several locations in London, Dorset, and Somerset before settling in South London for three years in 1878. During the late 1870s and early 1880s, Hardy published The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, A Laodicean, and Two on a Tower while consolidating his pace as a leading contemporary English novelist. He would also eventually produce four volumes of short stories: Wessex Tales, A Group of Noble Dames, Life's Little Ironies, and A Changed Man.

In 1883, Hardy and his wife moved back to Dorchester, where Hardy wrote The Mayor of Casterbridge, set in a fictionalized version of Dorchester, and went on to design and construct a permanent home for himself, named Max Gate, completed in 1885. In the later 1880s and early 1890s Hardy wrote three of his greatest novels, The Woodlanders, Tess of the d'Urbevilles, and Jude the Obscure, all of them notable for their remarkable tragic power. The latter two were initially published as magazine serials in which Hardy removed potentially objectionable moral and religious content, only to restore it when the novels were published in book form; both novels nevertheless aroused public controversy for their criticisms of Victorian sexual and religious mores. In particular, the appearance of Jude the Obscure in 1895 precipitated harsh attacks on Hardy's alleged pessimism and immorality; the attacks contributed to his decision to abandon the writing of fiction after the appearance of his last-published novel, The Well-Beloved.

In the later 1890s Hardy returned to the writing of poetry that he had abandoned for fiction thirty years earlier. Wessex Poems appeared in 1898, followed by several volumes of poetry at regular intervals over the next three decades. Between 1904 and 1908 Hardy published a three-part epic verse drama, The Dynasts, based on the Napoleonic Wars of the early nineteenth century. Following the death of his first wife in 1912, Hardy married his literary secretary Florence Dugdale in 1914. Hardy received a variety of public honors in the last two decades of his life and continued to publish poems until his death at Max Gate on January 11, 1928. His ashes were interred in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey in London and his heart in Stinsford outside Dorchester. Regarded as one of England's greatest authors of both fiction and poetry, Hardy has inspired such notable twentieth-century writers as Marcel Proust, John Cowper Powys, D. H. Lawrence, Theodore Dreiser, and John Fowles.

Author biography from the Barnes & Noble Classics edition of Far from the Madding Crowd.

1. Date of Birth:
  
  June 2, 1840
2. Place of Birth:
  
  Higher Brockhampon, Dorset, England
1. Date of Death:
  
  January 11, 1928
2. Place of Death:
  
  Max Gate, Dorchester, England
1. Education:
  
  Served as apprentice to architect James Hicks

	General Editor's Preface
	A Map of Hardy's Wessex
	Introduction
	Note on the Texts
	Select Bibliography
	A Chronology of Thomas Hardy
	How I Built Myself a House	3
	Destiny and a Blue Cloak	11
	The Thieves Who Couldn't Help Sneezing	36
	An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress	43
	Our Exploits at West Poley	114
	Old Mrs Chundle	164
	The Doctor's Legend	173
	The Spectre of the Real	184
	Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer	212
	The Unconquerable	220
	Explanatory Notes	235

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An Indiscretion in the Life of an Heiress and Other Stories

Overview

All Available Formats + Editions

More About This Book

Overview

Product Details

Meet the Author

Thomas Hardy

Biography

Table of Contents

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