Under the Greenwood Tree

· Penguin UK
Ebook
224
Pages
Eligible
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About this ebook

'At sight of him had the pink of her cheeks increased, lessened, or did it continue to cover its normal area of ground? It was a question meditated several hundreds of times by her visitor in after-hours - the meditation, after wearying involutions, always ending in one way, that it was impossible to say'

The arrival of two newcomers in the quiet village of Mellstock arouses a bitter feud and leaves a convoluted love affair in its wake. While the Reverend Maybold creates a furore among the village's musicians with his decision to abolish the church's traditional 'string choir' and replace it with a modern mechanical organ, the new schoolteacher, Fancy Day, causes an upheaval of a more romantic nature, winning the hearts of three very different men - a local farmer, a church musician and Maybold himself. Under the Greenwood Tree follows the ensuing maze of intrigue and passion with gentle humour and sympathy, deftly evoking the richness of village life, yet tinged with melancholy for a rural world that Hardy saw fast disappearing.

The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the beginning of the First World War.

About the author

Formerly a prize-winning architectural student, Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) went on to become a prolific novelist and poet. Under the Greenwood Tree was the first of Hardy's novels to be set in Wessex, and the 'partly real, partly dream-country' forms a background to the novel that is both wild and provincial.

Hardy's novels Far From the Madding Crowd, The Return of the Native, Two on a Tower, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure are also published in the Penguin English Library.

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