PREFATORY NOTE
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 wereformerly printed in this series, were also transferred to Wessex Tales, where they more naturally belong. The present narratives and sketches, though separately published at
various antecedent dates, were first collected and issued in a volume in 1894.

Thomas Hardy May 1912

 

Eight short stories which tenderly re-create a rapidly vanishing rural world and which scrutinses the repressions of 'fin-de-siecle' bourgeois life. They share many of the concerns within Hardy's major novels, such as the failure of modern marriage and the insidious effects of social ambition on the family and community life. Ranging widely in leght and complexity, they are unified by Hardy's quintessential irony, which embrasses both the farcical and the tragic aspects of human existence.

The phrase 'Life Little Ironies' was coined by Hardy for this his third volume of short stories. These sketches and tales possess all the power of his major works, the wealth of description, the realistic portrayal of the quaint lore of Wessex, the humour of characterisation, the poignant estimate of human nature and the brooding sense of wonder at the essentila mysteries of life.

Story One

An Imaginative Woman

Story Two

The Son's Veto

Story Three

For Conscience' Sake

Story Four

A Tragedgy of Two Ambitions

Story Five

On the Western Circuit

Story Six

To Please His Wife

Story Seven

The Fiddler on the Reels

Story Eight

A Few Crusted Characters