Showing results by author "Thomas Hardy" in All Categories

Once more the year begins. The first month of the Gregorian calendar. Cold winds howl, the landscape shivers, frost, snow, ice are the many blankets for the land. Daylight is thin; it arrives late and leaves early, ceding the hours to shadow and the ink of night. From the pens of our remarkable poets, including Shelley, Dickenson, Shakespeare, Whitman, Gilbran and a wealth of others, come sumptuous verse that describe our moods, feelings, travels and desires of the dawning year.

Between then and now poets have written verse, both serious and humorous, in attempts to keep a poetic track both of feelings and as a tribute to our four-legged friends and their adventures.

We absolutely adore novels written and set in the Britain of the 19th century, and late 18th century. We want to bring the stories from The Golden Age of the British Novel to life, and make them ’accessible’ to a modern audience.

"Barbara of the House of Grebe" is a short story from Thomas Hardys collection "A Group of Noble Dames". It is a dark that intertwines madness and desire. Barbara Grebe is already promised to a wealthy lord when she elopes with another young man, Edmond Willowes. He suffers a terrible disfigurement, and the couples love begins to falter. Hardys pessimism is revealed in his total rejection of the idea of eternal love, certain of its ephemerality.

Opportunistic, shrewd and beautiful, Ethelberta resolves to disguise her humble beginnings and elevate her position in society. Crafting her career as a society poet and staging her family as her servants, she proves admirably adept at sustaining her own web of deceit as she reinvents herself and navigates the attentions of four different suitors. The wealthiest is not the one she loves... what will she do? This is a light-hearted urban tale, offering a different side of Thomas Hardy.