Under the Greenwood Tree - or The Mellstock Quire

Thomas Hardy

Macmillan

1940

237 páginas

7h 54m

ISBN-13: 9780199697205

One of the most popular of Hardy's novels, Under the Greenwood Tree is a delightful and humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. The story delicately balances the concerns of the Mellstock parish choir with a romance between the village schoolmistress and a member of the
choir. Hardy thought well enough of the tale to place it among his Novels of Character and Environment, a group with includes his most characteristic work.

This freshly reset second edition features a new introduction by Phillip Mallett, who explores the tension in the novel between a vanishing rural idyll and the social realities making change inevitable; the novel's portrait of rural life and character; its revealing textual history and the relation
of art to elegy. This edition also features new, expanded notes which provide historical background, gloss dialect and unfamiliar terms, and highlight significant revisions.

Lastly, both the introduction and the notes take into account the substantial critical discussion that has taken place in the 27 years since the edition was first published. The book also includes maps of Hardy's Wessex and the fictional setting of Mellstock, a new and up-to-date bibliography, and a
thorough chronology.

Clare Leighton, who has illustrated with her beautiful wood engravings not only her own books - "Four Hedges", "Country Matters" and "The Farmer's Year" - but such classics as "Wuthering Heights" and "The Return of the Native", has now made more than sixty engravings for this Centenary Edition of "Under the Greenwood Tree", commemorating Thomas Hardy's birth in 1840.

Miss Leighton has won a place among England's outstanding artists: "a rural Rembrandt" is the title given her by Ernest Rhys, who, in the Observer, stresses "her uncanny mastery of light and shade". Henry Seidel Canby, writing in The Saturday Revie of Literature, has remarked on "the great pictorial beauty of her extraordinarily strong and dramatic engravings". She has been called "one of the finest of contemporary wood engravers".

Both as artist and as one who knows intimately the country of Thomas Hardy's novels, Miss Leighton has made this illustrated edition one which should appel equally to art lovers and lovers of Hardy's work.