Thomas Hardy
8 books by Thomas Hardy to read free, each with its best passages and lines, and the best quotes from all of them below.
Where to start
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Tess of the d’Urbervilles
A young woman of poor and uneducated parents is driven by guilt to try to redeem her family’s fortunes.
149,325 words, about 10 hours
Then
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Far from the Madding Crowd
A young shepherd falls in love with a young, seemingly independent and strong-willed lady farmer.
137,443 words, about 10 hours
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Jude the Obscure
A promising young man’s life is marred by failure, tragedy, and loss.
146,199 words, about 10 hours
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The Return of the Native
A young woman longs to find a husband who can deliver her from her unexciting rural life.
142,738 words, about 10 hours
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The Mayor of Casterbridge
Filled with remorse after abandoning his wife and baby daughter, Michael Henchard, an out-of-work hay-trusser, resolves to set his life on a better path.
115,893 words, about 8 hours
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A Pair of Blue Eyes
A vicar’s daughter becomes engaged to two men, and has not told them of each other.
131,043 words, about 9 hours
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The Woodlanders
A young woman struggles with the opposing forces of class and love.
135,665 words, about 10 hours
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Short Fiction
A collection of Thomas Hardy’s short stories, mostly ordered by date of publication.
378,557 words, about 27 hours
Thomas Hardy quotes
The pair of legs that carried him were rickety, and there was a bias in his gait which inclined him somewhat to the left of a straight line.
When Farmer Oak smiled, the corners of his mouth spread till they were within an unimportant distance of his ears, his eyes were reduced to chinks, and diverging wrinkles appeared round them, extending upon his countenance like the rays in a rudimentary sketch of the rising sun.
Events did not rhyme quite as he had thought.
The place became full of a watchful intentness now; for when other things sank brooding to sleep the heath appeared slowly to awake and listen.
Virtually she walked the highway alone, save for the child she bore.
Elfride Swancourt was a girl whose emotions lay very near the surface.
The physiognomy of a deserted highway expresses solitude to a degree that is not reached by mere dales or downs, and bespeaks a tomb-like stillness more emphatic than that of glades and pools.
It is a strange fact, that a person’s new house drawn in outline on the ground where it is to stand, looks ridiculously and inconveniently small.
When they were together the Jacobean and the Victorian ages were juxtaposed.
Love, being an extremely exacting usurer
In sad wet seasons, though he knew it must rain at Christminster too, he could hardly believe that it rained so drearily there.
The great inviolate place had an ancient permanence which the sea cannot claim.
Though what you hear now is little more than the clatter and scurry of getting away the money o’ children and fools, for the real business is done earlier than this.
What a proud moment it was for Elfride then! She was ruling a heart with absolute despotism for the first time in her life.
Where the eyes of a multitude beat like waves upon a countenance they seem to wear away its individuality; but in the still water of privacy every tentacle of feeling and sentiment shoots out in visible luxuriance
“I am only partly in man’s clothes,” she faltered, shrinking back to the wall.
Directly Tess was out of sight, and the interest of the matter as a drama was at an end, the little ones’ eyes filled with tears.
Farmer Oak had one-and-a-half Christian characteristics too many to succeed with Bathsheba: his humility, and a superfluous moiety of honesty.
It was better to love a woman than to be a graduate, or a parson; ay, or a pope!
There had been no obliteration, because there had been no tending.