Mostrando resultados por autor "Thomas Hardy" en Todas las categorías

Death is a subject that few of us talk about, but many think about and more than a few of us dread. Whether it is the actual end of our life’s journey or merely a transit point to heavenly glory, its actual point of impact is, obviously, life-changing. But what do poets think of it? How do their minds tangle with the subject and make sense of this? That’s what we wondered too. Poets as rich and diverse as Tennyson, Hardy, Shelley, and Poe here share their words, thoughts and visions with us.

Christmas brings out the best and the worst in us, as can been seen in this evocative anthology. Among what Thomas Love Peacock calls the "many poetical charms in the heraldings of Christmas," there are eulogies by saints and diatribes from curmudgeons. Here, Christmas is expounded by divines, sung by rustics, deplored by philosophers, made mystical in stories and summed up in a line by the poet Elizabeth Jennings: "The hush, the star, the baby, people being kind again."

Working-class Jude Fawley longs to be a scholar. But after scheming local girl Arabella Donn traps him in marriage, Jude finds his university dreams drifting away. When his wife abandons him, a window of opportunity opens, and Jude moves to Christminster to work as a stonemason - his eye still on his studies. Then he falls in love with the modern-minded Sue Bridehead, and his descent into scandal, tragedy, and ruin truly begins. Shunned by society and the church, the outcasts find themselves on the brink of despair.

This selection of Hardy's poetry does full justice to its humanity, integrity, humour and evocative power, ranging from charming anthology pieces such as Weathers to the great love poems he wrote after the death of his first wife and his meditations on war and phillosophy.

When peddler John Durbeyfield learns that he may be a descendant of a noble family, he sends his oldest child, Tess, to “claim kin.” Blindly ushered into harm’s way, the strong-willed yet untinctured peasant girl is not prepared for the blighted course her life will take. Nor for those whose destructive desires will determine her fate, and force Tess to make only the most desperate of choices. From her tragic loss of innocence through betrayal and revenge, Tess’s struggle for survival challenged the era’s mores and the cruel indifference shown women in Victorian society.

Deep in the grounds of Welland House lies an ancient memorial tower, surrounded by a prehistoric wilderness that isolates it from the rest of the land. When one day Viviette Constantine, the wife of the estate's owner, investigates the tower, she there discovers Swithin St. Cleeve, a young astronomer who introduces her to the majesty and wonders of the night sky. Instantly drawn to Swithin, and with her husband abroad, Viviette offers him use of the tower and becomes a kind of apprentice to him, and then, eventually, a lover.

Dylan Thomas made several recordings in the early 1950s of other poets' works. Here, he reads the poetry of D. H Lawrence, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats and Walter De La Mare.

Written in 1873 it was autobiographical and the heroine Elfride Swancourt is based on Hardy's first wife Emma Gifford. The novel tells the tail of a the love triangle between a young woman, Elfride Swancourt, and her two suitors from very different backgrounds.

Simon Cliffe reads some of the greatest Christmas poems for the 12 days of Christmas. Day 1 - Merry Christmas by Louise May Alcott. Day 2 - Christ's Nativity by Henry Vaughan. Day 3 - Ceremonies for Christmas by Robert Herrick. Day 4 - New Prince, New Pomp by Robert Southwell. Day 5 - Christmas Cheer by Thomas Tusser. Day 6 - Ring Out, Wild Bells by Lor Alfred Tennyson. Day 7 - The Oxen by Thomas Hardy. Day 8 - Nativity by John Donne. Day 9 - A Christmas Carol by G.K. Chesterton.

"The Hand of Ethelberta" (1876) is a comedy novel by Thomas Hardy. Ethelberta was raised in humble circumstances but, through her work as a governess, married well at the age of eighteen. Her husband died two weeks after the wedding and, now twenty-one, Ethelberta lives with her mother-in-law, Lady Petherwin. In the three years that have elapsed since the deaths of both her husband and father-in-law, Ethelberta has been treated to foreign travel and further privilege by her benefactress, but restricted from seeing her poor family.

Thomas Hardy, never one to be conventional, took a very unconventional moral stance in this novel, which shocked readers of the time. In doing so, he created one of the great romantic novels of all time, the story of a striking and tragic heroine who came to life for the reader as she did for the author.

On her morning journey to earn money for her impoverished family, Tess' horse has an accident, forcing her to seek assistance from some newly rich relatives. There, she is vigorously pursued by Alec, who corners her in a field one night and takes advantage of her.

Eustacia Vye is a beautiful, commanding presence on England's Egdon Heath. Her longing for the glamour of city life leaves her dissatisfied with her traditionalist husband, Clym Yeobright, and leads her to take Damon Wildeve as her lover. In a mixing of fate, chance, and human error, Eustacia's marriage smolders and explodes in violent tragedy. Set against the looming presence of the Heath, Hardy's work vividly depicts characters cruelly manipulated by the forces around them, unable to dictate their own fates. This classic story, a forerunner to the 20th-century psychological novel, is presented in unabridged form, revealing all of its poetic compassion and universal themes.

Under the Greenwood Tree, Hardy's second novel, was published in 1872 and became the first of his great series of Wessex novels. The book, subtitled A Rural Painting of the Dutch School, tells the endearing tale of a group of church musicians who accompany the hymns at the local Mellstock parish choir and we follow the fortunes of one of its member, Dick Dewy, who falls in love with the new school mistress, Fancy Day.

Set in Egdon Heath, a wild tract of country in the southwest of England, this is a masterpiece of dramatic tension. Clym Yeobright, a diamond merchant in Paris, returns to his home in Egdon, where he falls passionately in love with the sensuous, free-spirited Eustacia Vye. She, while in a brief state of infatuation, marries him, hoping he will take her away to a more exciting life in Paris. But Eustacia's dreams of escape are not to be realized.

Read by Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow, A Literary Christmas is a seasonal anthology that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens’ ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new - from John Donne’s Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Rudyard Kipling’s "Christmas in India", from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to Laurie Lee’s "Cider with Rosie".

Far from the Madding Crowd is Thomas Hardy's fourth novel. It centers on the lives of five characters: Gabriel Oak, Bathsheba Everdene, Mr. Boldwood, Sgt. Troy, and Fanny Robin. The plot involves love, loyalty, death, and betrayal, and all this is delivered to us in Hardy's most eloquent prose. The images of character and nature are painted for our mind's eye with sublime style.

Barbara, a young and impetuous heiress, rejects the stern Lord Uplandtowers to elope with a poor but handsome man, Edmund Willowes. When Barbara’s parents send Edmund to Europe, they hope to change him into a more suitable match for their daughter. But after disaster strikes, Edmund returns in a way nobody could have imagined.

Many giants of literature originate from the shores of the emerald isles: Shakespeare, Dickens, Chaucer, the Brontes, and Austen, to which most people would willingly add the name Thomas Hardy. Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and The Mayor of Casterbridge are but three of his literary masterpieces. But let us go further and add to his canon his poems....

Jocelyn Pierston, a successful sculptor, is helpless in the face of "the well-beloved": the manifestation of perfect womanhood that seems to move like a will-o'-the-wisp from one acquaintance to the next. It shapes his whole life. Where his artistry involves permanence - cold stone objects - his heart is caught by ephemeral beauty. After years spent in London, a return to his rocky birthplace, the Isle of Slingers, sparks Pierston's extraordinary involvement with three generations of the Caro family.