Based on contemporary notes, letters, diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral information in conversations extending over many years.

The Guarded Life challenges some of the long-held views of Hardy - did he spend all his early life in preparation for his career as a writer, and did his novels really come a distant second to his poetry in his heart? In his personal life, did his first wife, Emma Hardy, really trick him into marriage and was she the ambitious women her enemies have painted her as being? And what of Florence, his second wife, who has so often been caricatured in her conflicted and passionate feelings for Hardy? By examining the relationships and contexts that shaped Hardy most - the women, the friendships and mentors, the social and family pressures, the career structures and the Dorsetshire landscape - The Guarded Life reveals the personality and emotional life of a public figure who has despite his fame remained until now largely obscure.

'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...' After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions. Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Hardy's works available in Penguin Classics are A Laodicean, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, Selected Poems, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Pursuit of the Well-beloved and The Well-beloved, The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, The Withered Arm and Other Stories, The Woodlanders, Two on a Tower and Under the Greenwood Tree.

A Changed Man and Other Tales is a collection of twelve tales written by Thomas Hardy. The collection was originally published in book form in 1913, although all of the tales had been previously published in newspapers or magazines from 1881 to 1900.There are eleven short stories and a novella The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid. At the end of the book there is a map of the imaginary Wessex of Hardy's novels and poems. Six of the stories were published before 1891 and therefore lacked international copyright protection when the collection began to be sold in October 1913.[