Hearkening back to the Wessex of an earlier Napoleonic period, Hardy's novel creates a homely world of likeable, though sometimes dull folk, anxious to get on with the business of falling in love despite the threat of imminent landing by the French. With a seemingly infinite range of voices Benjamin Whitrow recreates each of them as only this trained English actor could. Hardy and Whitrow combine to create a world of charming local types: the gentle miller and his two sons; the crude but scheming Festus Derriman and his delightfully miserly uncle, old farmer Derriman; and the beautiful object of all their attentions, sweet Anne Garland. For readers used to Hardy's star-crossed characters, this romance is a delightful discovery. P.A.J. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine
--This text refers to the
Audio Cassette
edition.
Book Description
Thomas Hardy distrusted nineteenth-century efforts to systematize history, believing the human qualities of desire and conflicting loyalties undermined such attempts. Thus, although he set the courtship of Anne Garland by her three suitors against the larger-than-life backdrop of the Napoleonic Wars, he considered his characters' loves and sorrows to be as much the material of history as any record of emperors and generals. This edition is the only one to be based on the novel's manuscript. It restores Hardy's original punctuation and removes the bowdlerisms forced upon him by the editor of the magazine in which it first appeared.
