Английский язык — Thomas Hardy

A level 3 Oxford Bookworms Library graded readers. Retold for Learners of English by Clare West. On a stormy winter night, a stranger knocks at the door of a shepherd’s cottage. He is cold and hungry, and wants to get out of the rain. He is welcomed inside, but he does not give his name or his business. Who is he, and where has he come from? And he is only the first visitor to call at the cottage that night… In these three short stories, Thomas Hardy gives us pictures of the lives of shepherds...

A level 1 Oxford Bookworms Library graded readers. Retold for Learners of English by Jennifer Bassett. A woman and a man… words of love whispered on a summer night. Later, there is a child, but no wedding-ring. And then the man leaves the first woman, finds a younger woman, marries her… It's an old story. Yes, it's an old, old story. It happens all the time – today, tomorrow, a hundred years ago. People don't change. But this story, set among the green hills of southern England, has something...

A level 2 Oxford Bookworms Library graded readers. Retold for Learners of English by Jennifer Bassett. Tony Kytes is a favourite with the girls but he’s not terribly clever. If you meet an old girlfriend and she asks for a ride home in your wagon, do you say yes? And then if you meet the girl you are planning to marry, what do you do? Very soon, Tony is in a great muddle, and does not know how to escape from it. These stories are set in an English country village of the nineteenth century, but...

A level 5 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by Clare West. Bathsheba Everdene is young, proud, and beautiful. She is an independent woman and can marry any man she chooses – if she chooses. In fact, she likes her independence, and she likes fighting her own battles in a man’s world. But it is never wise to ignore the power of love. There are three men who would very much like to marry Bathsheba. When she falls in love with one of them, she soon wishes she had...

A level 6 Oxford Bookworms Library graded reader. Retold for Learners of English by Clare West. A pretty young girl has to leave home to make money for her family. She is clever and a good worker; but she is uneducated and does not know the cruel ways of the world. So, when a rich young man says he loves her, she is careful – but not careful enough. He is persuasive, and she is overwhelmed. It is not her fault, but the world says it is. Her young life is already stained by men's desires, and by...

Part of Penguin’s beautiful hardback Clothbound Classics series, designed by the award-winning Coralie Bickford-Smith, these delectable and collectible editions are bound in high-quality colourful, tactile cloth with foil stamped into the design. When Tess Durbeyfield is driven by family poverty to claim kinship with the wealthy D’Urbervilles and seek a portion of their family fortune, meeting her ‘cousin’ Alec proves to be her downfall. A very different man, Angel Clare, seems to offer her love...

Hardy's account of a pure woman betrayed by love is his most powerful and moving novel. Set in the sometimes bleak but always magical Wessex landscape so familiar from his earlier stories, Tess of the d'Urbervilles works up a domestic drama to heights of tragic intensity which make the book a fit companion for Anna Karenina and Madame Bovary.

Thomas Hardy started composing poetry in the heyday of Tennyson and Browning. He was still writing with unimpaired power sixty years later, when Eliot and Yeats were the leading names in the field. His extraordinary stamina and a consistent individuality of style and vision made him a survivor, immune to literary fashion. At the start of the twenty-first century his reputation stands higher than it ever did, even in his own lifetime. He is now recognised not only as a great poet, but as one...

With an Introduction and Notes by Dr Claire Seymour, University of Kent at Canterbury. Under the Greenwood Tree is Hardy's most bright, confident and optimistic novel. This delightful portrayal of a picturesque rural society, tinged with gentle humour and quiet irony, established Hardy as a writer. However, the novel is not merely a charming rural idyll. The double-plot, in which the love story of Dick Dewey and Fancy Day is inter-related with a tragic chapter in the history of Mellstock...

'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...' After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language. Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride...