The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories 1888-1900

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Summary: Lessons for the heart in Hardy's cruel universe.
Review: Author of TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) and JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895), Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), is by far my favorite Victorian novelist. In this second of a two-volume collection of Hardy's short stories, editor Kristin Brady (THE WITHERED ARM AND OTHER STORIES 1874-1888) focuses on stories that were first published between 1888 and 1900, a period shortly after Hardy's completion of his most compelling novels. This book, which includes an excellent history together with appendices of the texts, may be read as a collection of Thomas Hardy love stories. For Hardy, love was just another form of human suffering.

As his ordinary characters follow their hearts, they discover the course of romantic love is never easy and rarely happy in Hardy's cruel universe. Set primarily in The Wessex of Hardy's novels, and with all the pathos of TESS and JUDE, the eleven short stories collected here ("The Melancholy Hussar," "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions," "The First Countess of Wessex," "Barbara of the House of Grebe," "For Conscience' Sake," "The Son's Veto," "On the Western Circuit," "An Imaginative Woman," "A Changed Man," and "Enter a Dragoon") reveal romantic love thwarted by tragedy, disaster, betrayals, and cruelty. These haunting stories have parallels to Hardy's more controversial, major novels, and they are certain to satisy readers (like me), who love reading Victorian literature.

G. Merritt