This updated authoritative edition of the classic Hardy novel, which was published anonymously and first attributed to George Eliot, is set from Hardy's revised, unedited final draft of 1912 and features a new Introduction and Afterword. There is in England no more real or typical district than Thomas Hardy's imaginary Wessex, the scattered fields and farms of which were first discovered in Far from the Madding Crowd. It is here that Gabriel Oak observes...

Young Tess Durbeyfield attempts to restore her family's fortunes by claiming their connection with the aristocratic d'Urbervilles. But Alec d'Urberville is a rich wastrel who seduces her and makes her life miserable. When Tess meets Angel Clare, she is offered true love and happiness, but her past catches up with her and she faces an agonizing moral choice...

"The story opens when an unemployed farmhand, Michael Henchard, sells his wife, Susan, and daughter, Elizabeth-Jane, while in a drunken stupor at a fair, for five guineas to a sailor called Newson. On sobering up the following day, Henchard is filled with remorse, swears a twenty year abstinence from alcohol and begins a search for his family. Eighteen years later the reformed Henchard has become the mayor of Casterbridge, but his past is set to...

This story of the Mellstock Quire and its old established west-gallery musicians, with some supplementary descriptions of similar officials in Two on a Tower, A Few Crusted Characters, and other places, is intended to be a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of the time.

Set in a peasant village in rural, Victorian England, the author's best-known classic traces the persecution of one determined young woman by the closed-minded society around her and by fate on a cosmic scale

Contains 25 braid designs.

"Gabriel Oak is an honest, hard-working young farmer, who falls in love with the beautiful and independent Bathsheba Everdene. After a tragic accident, Gabriel loses his farm. Bathsheba, on the other hand, becomes rich. Is there any hope for Gabriel?"--Cover.

In a small village in the south of England, a handsome working man falls in love with the newly arrived schoolteacher from a wealthy family who happens to be the village beauty. Other richer men want to win her hand as well. Who will win her hand?