The Excluded and Collaborative Stories

by Thomas Hardy

Included in this edition are ten stories which were never collected into volumes during Hardy's lifetime. Some contain references to actual people, or plot elements that he reused elsewhere, and others, such as his stories for children, were simply too different from his other work in the short story form. Although all of these stories occupy significant positions within Hardy's career, none has previously received serious editorial treatment. For the most part they have been ignored, lightly passed over, or misinterpreted by critics and biographers. This edition remedies some of the deficiencies in Hardy scholarship, both in its historical introductions and in its critically edited texts, which are based on full collations of all editions published before Hardy's death and all surviving manuscripts, typescripts, and previously neglected proofs.

456 pages, Hardcover

First published November 12, 1992

About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain.

The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.

Excerpted from Wikipedia.