A drunken laborer sells his wife and child and spends his life trying to atone for his wrongdoing -- while clinging to his social status. A spellbinding portrayal of ambition, rivalry, revenge, and repentance.
Tragedy haunts the works of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), whose fiction abounds in star-crossed lovers and other characters thwarted by fate or their own shortcomings. Hardy's outspoken criticism of Victorian society excited such profound controversy that the author abandoned fiction and in the 20th century published only poetry.
