The Withered Arm and Other Stories 1874-1888

Oct 11, 2024 2:20 PM

Author:Thomas Hardy,Kirsten Brady,Kirsten Brady,Kirsten Brady,Patricia Ingham

"See if she is dark or fair, and if you can, notice if her hands be white; if not, see if they look as though she had ever done housework, or are milker's hands like mine."

So Rhoda Brook, the abandoned mistress of Farmer Lodge, is jealous to discover details of his new bride in 'The Withered Arm', the title story in this selection of Hardy's finest short stories. Hardy's first story, 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak' was written fresh from the success of Far From the Madding Crowd. Beautiful in their own right, these stories are also testing-grounds for the novels in their controversial sexual politics, their refusal of romance structures, and their elegiac pursuit of past, lost loves.

Several of the stories in The Withered Arm were collected to form the famous volume, Wessex Tales (1888), the first time Hardy denoted 'Wessex' to describe his fictional world. The Withered Arm is the first of a new two-volume selection of Hardy's short stories, edited with an introduction and notes by Kristin Brady.

Reviews

A most wonderful, lurid, poisonous little tale

—— Oscar Wilde

It really does turn your blood cold

—— Colm Tóibín

Technically, he is extraordinarily brilliant, and stylistically he's wonderful

—— David Lodge

Henry James is as solitary in the history of the novel as Shakespeare is in the history of poetry

—— Graham Greene

[James] is the most intelligent man of his generation

—— T. S. Eliot

The Turn of the Screw is the most hopelessly evil story that we have ever read in any literature, ancient or modern

—— Independent

We are afraid of something unnamed, of something, perhaps, in ourselves... Henry James...can still make us afraid of the dark

—— Virginia Woolf

Dark, funny and disturbing

—— London Review of Books

These 10 inventive stories, set mostly in the Florida Everglades, mix satire and sophisticated whimsy

—— New York Times

Karen Russell has produced an engaging debut. Her ability to integrate mythology and the supernatural with the very contemporary...is reminiscent of Angela Carter, but unlike Carter's many imitators, Russell never descends into whimsy... In St Lucy's, humans, ghosts and animals are utterly real; and Russell sells the genuine article, a seemingly effortless writer

—— Alisa Cox , Mslexia

These are stories that will sneak into the back of your brain and lurk there long after you are finished reading.

—— Global Review

Poignant and wonderful story...concentrates, without effort, all Malouf's themes...it needs to be read

—— Prospect

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