When Jack and Joan Durbeyfield learn that their ancestors were the d\"Urbervilles - a rich and well-known family - they hope it will make their lives better. They send their eldest daughter, Tess, to introduce herself to some \\\"relatives\\\". There, Tess meets Alec d\"Urberville, who immediately notices her beauty....

A collectible new Penguin Classics series: stunning, clothbound editions of ten favourite poets, which present each poet\"s most famous book of verse as it was originally published. Designed by the acclaimed Coralie Bickford-Smith and beautifully set, these slim, A format volumes are the ultimate gift editions for poetry lovers....

Thomas Hardy\"s novel of swift passion and slow courtship is imbued with evocative descriptions of rural life, and with unflinching honesty about sexual relationships....

Subtitled \"A Story of a Man of Character\", Hardy\"s powerful study of the heroic but deeply flawed Michael Henchard is an intensely dramatic work, tragically played out against the vivid backdrop of a close-knit Dorsetshire town....

Bathsheba Everdene is a headstrong young woman who attracts the attentions of a succession of ill-matched suitors: a quiet sheep farmer, a handsome soldier and an older, wealthy landowner. As the men vie for her affections, she struggles to retain her independence of spirit in the face of their declarations....

After an accident, Tess Durbeyfield, the daughter of impoverished peasants, decides to call on the aristocratic d’Urbervilles, as she believes that she is also descended from their ancient Norman lineage and that they can rescue her family from indigence....

Jude Fawley, an intelligent and sensitive young Wessex schoolboy, dreams of studying at the famous university in Christminster, Hardy’s fictional representation of Oxford. He embarks on years of private study, but his plans are thrown into disarray when he is deceived into marriage and then deserted by the duplicitous Arabella Donn....

Self-taught young stonemason Jude Fawley yearns to attend the university of Christminster, but his dreams are thwarted when he is forced into an unhappy marriage. As the marriage collapses and Jude and his wife separate, he meets his free-spirited cousin Sue Bridehead with whom he immediately falls in love....

In a drunken stupor, protagonist Michael Henchard mistakenly sells his wife and child to a sailor. Eighteen years later, secrets and lies threaten the protagonist\"s well-off lifestyle as mayor....

Beautiful and spirited, but also impoverished and mistreated, Tess suffers through the hypocrisy of Victorian society, and falls victim to injustice. Controversial at the time of writing and censored when it was first published, the novel is now considered Hardy\"s masterwork....

Far from the Madding Crowd is perhaps the most pastoral of Hardy’s Wessex novels. It tells the story of the young farmer Gabriel Oak and his love for and pursuit of the elusive Bathsheba Everdene, whose wayward nature leads her to both tragedy and true love....

Set in Hardy\"s Wessex, Tess is a moving novel of hypocrisy and double standards. Its challenging sub-title, A Pure Woman, infuriated critics when the book was first published in 1891, and it was condemned as immoral and pessimistic....

HarperCollins is pround to present its new range of best-loved, essential classics. ‘My life looks as if it had been wasted for want of chances! When I see what you know, what you have read, and seen, and thought, I feel what a nothing I am!...

Hardy described the theme of The Woodlanders as \"the immortal puzzle -given the man and woman, how to find a basis for their sexual relation\". Set in the familiar Dorset landscape, this time on the wooded outskirts of Blackmoor Vale, it tells the story of two women who love the same man....

In The Return of the Native Hardy once more treats his favourite theme of the mismatched couple with masterly pathos and understatement. Eustacia Vye longs to escape from Egdon Heath but the man she chooses to save her longs to stay....