Short Fiction

Their subject matter coheres well with his novels. Almost without exception they narrate tales of Wessex, Hardy’s beloved region in the southeast of England, which largely overlaps with today’s counties of Devon, Somerset, and Dorset. Many are narrated by embedded characters, recalling romances, tragedies, and the occasional triumph from bygone years. Hardy’s familiar themes of misplaced ambition and thwarted love recur frequently.

Hardy published forty-four short stories in his lifetime (including two collaborations), and two more were published posthumously. One of the posthumously published stories is not yet in the public domain, and print editions of two other stories (“Our Exploits at West Poley” and “The Thieves Who Couldn’t Help Sneezing”) couldn’t be located; the remaining forty-three stories are collected here, ordered mostly by date of first publication with the exception of the sequence found in Hardy’s 1891 collection A Group of Noble Dames.

This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.