Publisher's Synopsis
Life's Little Ironies is a collection of tales written by Thomas Hardy, originally published in 1894, and republished with a slightly different collection of stories, for the Uniform Edition in 1927/8. 1927 edition contents An Imaginative Woman... The Son's Veto For Conscience' Sake A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions On the Western Circuit To Please His Wife The Fiddler of the Reels A Few Crusted Characters- Introduction Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver The History of the Hardcomes The Superstitious Man's Story Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir The Winters and the Palmleys Incident in the Life of Mr. George Crookhill Netty Sargent's Copyhold There is a Prefatory Note to the revised edition, written by the author, which says this of the above contents: "Of the following collection the first story, 'An Imaginative Woman', originally stood in Wessex Tales, but was brought into this volume as being more nearly its place, turning as it does upon a trick of Nature, so to speak, a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations. The two stories named 'A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four' and 'The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion', which were formerly printed in this series, were also transferred to Wessex Tales, where they more naturally belong. The above alterations were first made in the Uniform Edition in 1927. The present narratives and sketches, though separately published at various antecedent dates, were first collected and issued in a volume in 1894. T.H." The original collection came out as a pocket edition in 1907 (reprinted nine times); the 1927 revision was reset and issued 1928 (reprinted 1929, 1937, 1953). Six of the stories (excluding "To Please His Wife" and "A Few Crusted Characters") appeared in the Penguin Classic The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories. Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 - 11 January 1928) 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, though Hardy focused more on a declining rural society. 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. Many of his novels concern tragic characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances, and they are often set in the semi-fictional region of Wessex; initially based on the medieval Anglo-Saxon kingdom, Hardy's Wessex eventually came to include the counties of Dorset, Wiltshire, Somerset, Devon, Hampshire and much of Berkshire, in southwest and south central England. Two of his novels, Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, were listed in the top 50 on the BBC's survey The Big Read.
