The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories

Today Thomas Hardy is known almost exclusively for his outstanding novels and his poetry, and yet he authored some of the finest short stories in the English language. Nearly all of his fifty-three short stories were written between 1880 and 1900, and were popular with many Victorian readers. His stories typically have a narrative structure, often with some historical basis. Many are presented as reminiscences. The three stories in this little Dover reprint edition (0-486-29960-0) are The Three Strangers (1883), The Distracted Preacher (1879), and The Fiddler of the Reels (1893). The Three Strangers is a humorous, and yet suspenseful tale. Nineteen guests are gathered together on a dark rainy night in the isolated, rustic home of Shepherd and Shepherdess Fennel to celebrate the christening of their second daughter. Within an hour or so three strangers individually arrive, seeking temporary shelter from the storm. Hardy gradually reveals an unexpected connection between these three strangers. The Distracted Preacher is an adventuresome tale, apparently with an authentic historical basis. Mr. Stockdale, a young, inexperienced Wesleyan preacher, is assigned temporarily to the small village of Nether-Moynton. He quickly becomes enamored with his young, vibrant landlady, only to subsequently discover that she and her neighbors are engaged in smuggling liquor from France. Mr. Stockdale faces a moral dilemma. The ending is a bit too moralistic, and years later Thomas Hardy revealed that his publisher had forced him to change his original ending. Hardy's preferred ending is included for comparison. The Fiddler of the Reels is a tale of a fiddler with a fantastical, magical capability to overpower children and occasionally young women with his music. Apparently, this tale is among the best-known short stories of Thomas Hardy and can be found in many anthologies.

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