Hallo zusammen!
Ich kenne von Hardy die folgenden 3 Romane, deren Klappentext und eine kurze Biografie ich für Euch eingescannt habe. Ein seeeehr düsterer Autor, also nicht unbedingt zu empfehlen, wenn man sowieso schon deprimiert ist...
Grüsse
Sandhofer
Jude the Obscure
This tragic story of a young country workman obsessed by his ambition to become an Oxford student recounts the painful process of his disillusionment and destruction at the hands of an oppressive society. Interwoven here is Jude's fraught relationships with two women - Arabella, the country girl he marries, and cousin Sue Bridehead, an emancipated girl with whom Jude achieves brief happiness. One of Hardy's bleakest and most outs poken novels, this is a work of unremitting insight and power. It is also a novel of graphie contrasts: between town and country, sexual passion and the urge für knowledge, the death agony of an old era and the birthpangs of the new.
The Woodlanders
Returning to her native village of Little Hintock from an exclusive finishing school, Grace Melbury has social aspirations which her childhood sweetheart, Gilles Winterborne, cannot here to satisfy. Her father hopes that she will marry the fascinating young Dr Fitzpiers, a newcomer to the area who seems to be a much more suitable match. Fitzpiers certainly responds to Grace's beauty - but he is also attracted to a wealthy widow who lives in Hintock House, the mysterious Mrs Charmond. Powerful and rich in its imagery, The Woodlanders contains same of Hardy's finest descriptive writing.
Tess
is Hardy's most striking and tragic heroine and the character who meant most to him.
In a novel full of poetry and mysteriously luminous settings, he unfolds the story of his beautiful, suffering Tess with peculiar and unforgettable tenderness and intensity. As A. Alvarez comments: 'the plangent, heartbroken note of the great poems of loss and missed chances. . . is al ready present in Tess: in the continually roused, haunting descriptions of the landscape which crystallize intermittently into visionary states of mind, and above all in the power and beauty of the heroine whom he created and then, unwillingly, destroyed.'
Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, in Upper Brockhampton in Dorset, the son of a stonemason. He was educated locally and spent much of his life in the Wessex area, which would later serve as the setting für many of his novels. He first worked as an architect, but also began writing his first novel, The Paar Man and the Lady (1867), which was never published.
In 1874 he married Emma Gifford, by which time he had written four novels - Desperate Remedies, Under the Greenwood Tree, and A Pair of Blue Eyes. He wrote Far From the Madding Crowd the year of his marriage, and continued to produce a steady flow of novels, including The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge and Tess of the D' Urbevilles. His relationship with Emma was far from perfect, and their marital difficulties inspired Jude the Obscure. His novels became increasingly dark and brooding, his characters victims of a cruel and uncaring world. Although respected and highly esteemed in the literary world, his persistent pessimism was very unpopular with the book-buying public of the time, and both Tess and Jude prompted attacks by the critics.
Hardy then turned to poetry and ironically, was moved to write some of his most beautiful love poems after the death ofhis wife in 1912, expressing regrets about their past unhappiness together. He remarried in 1914 and remained in Dorset until his death in 1928 aged 87.
