Wessex Tales by Thomas Hardy Fiction Classics Short Stories Literary

<p><strong>Wessex Tales is a collection of tales written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840.</strong></p><p>In addition to his great Wessex Novels Thomas Hardy wrote <em>Wessex Tales</em> (1896) a collection of six stories written in the 1880s and 1890s that for the most part are as bleakly ironic and unforgiving as the darkest of his great novels -- <em>Jude the Obscure.</em> But this great novelist began and ended his writing career as a poet. In-between he wrote a number of books that many readers find emotionally-wrenching but which are considered among the classics of 19th Century British literature including <em>Far from the Madding Crowd</em> and <em>Tess of the D'Urbervilles.</em></p>