The Wessex Novels of Thomas Hardy. [Including Far from the Madding Crowd; The Mayor of Casterbridge; The Trumpet-Major; Tess of the D’Urbervilles; A Pair of Blue Eyes; Two on a Tower; The Return of the Native; Desperate Remedies; Wessex Tales.]

HARDY, Thomas.

$450.00

Item Number: 147342

London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, c. 1896.

The American edition of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex Novels. Octavo, seventeen volumes bound in the original publisher’s cloth with gilt titles to the spines, author’s initials stamped in gilt to the front panels, top edge gilt, tissue-guarded frontispiece to each volume, author’s signature in facsimile opposite the frontispiece of volume I. In very good condition with some toning to the spines, ownership signature and gift inscription to the front free endpaper of some volumes. The first uniform and collected edition of Hardy’s works in America.

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, especially William Wordsworth. He was highly critical of much in Victorian society, especially on the declining status of rural people in Britain, such as those from his native South West England. While Hardy wrote poetry throughout his life and regarded himself primarily as a poet, his first collection was not published until 1898. Initially, therefore, he gained fame as the author of such novels as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). During his lifetime, Hardy's poetry was acclaimed by younger poets (particularly the Georgians) who viewed him as a mentor. After his death his poems were lauded by Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden and Philip Larkin. For the Wessex Edition "Hardy revised his novels throughout for the last time. In a 'General Preface to the Novels and Poems', dated October 1911 and printed in Vol. I, he explained his classification of his novels here adopted for the first time and offered a brief apologia for his work. This is an essay of primary importance. The Wessex Edition is in every sense the definitive edition of Hardy's work and the last authority in questions of text" (Purdy).