Introduction

Summary

Wessex Tales is Thomas Hardy’s first collection of stories. Published as two volumes in 1888, it contains some of his best-known short works, including ‘The Three Strangers’, ‘The Withered Arm’ and ‘Fellow-Townsmen’. The longest story in the collection, ‘The Distracted Preacher’, is an exciting tale of smuggling on the Dorset coast based on the recollections of Hardy’s family. The Cambridge copy-text is the first edition of Wessex Tales, but it also includes Hardy’s story ‘An Imaginative Woman’, which was added later in the 1896 Osgood, McIlvaine edition. As with all volumes in the Cambridge Edition, full information on the publication history of the text is provided, along with a complete record of substantive variants. Illustrations include frontispieces for the first American edition along with those for the Osgood, McIlvaine and Wessex Editions. All of the illustrations for ‘An Imaginative Woman’ that appeared with its original publication in the Pall Mall Magazine are also reproduced.