Wessex Tales

First edition title page

Wessex Tales is an 1888 collection of tales written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840.

In the various short stories, Hardy writes of the true nature of nineteenth-century marriage and its inherent restrictions, the use of grammar as a diluted form of thought, the disparities created by the role of class status in determining societal rank, the stance of women in society and the severity of even minor diseases causing the rapid onset of fatal symptoms prior to the introduction of sufficient medicinal practices. A focal point of all the short stories is that of social constraints acting to diminish one's contentment in life, necessitating unwanted marriages, repression of true emotion and succumbing to melancholia due to constriction within the confines of 19th-century perceived normalcy.

Contents

Initially, in 1888, the collection contained five stories, all previously published in periodicals....

• "The Three Strangers" (1883)
• "The Withered Arm" (1888)
• "Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)
• "Interlopers at the Knap" (1884)
• "The Distracted Preacher" (1879)

For the 1896 reprinting, Hardy added a sixth...

• "An Imaginative Woman" (1894)

But in 1912, he reversed that decision, moving "An Imaginative Woman" to another collection, Life's Little Ironies (1894), while at the same time transferring two of the latter collection's stories...

• "A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)
• "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion" (1890)

...to Wessex Tales, for a final total of seven stories.

Dramatic adaptations

Six of the short stories were adapted as television dramas, forming the BBC2 anthology series Wessex Tales:

• "The Withered Arm" (7 November 1973, BBC2), adapted by Rhys Adrian, directed by Desmond Davis (The Internet Movie Database claims Davis is uncredited - this is an error) and starring Billie Whitelaw.
• "Fellow-Townsmen" (14 November 1973, BBC2), adapted by Douglas Livingstone, directed by Barry Davis, and starring Jane Asher.
• "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions" (21 November 1973, BBC2), adapted by Dennis Potter, directed by Michael Tuchner, and starring John Hurt. This story is from Hardy's collection Life's Little Ironies.
• "An Imaginative Woman" (28 November 1973, BBC2), adapted by William Trevor, directed by Gavin Millar, and starring Claire Bloom.
• "The Melancholy Hussar" (5 December 1973, BBC2), adapted by Ken Taylor, directed by Mike Newell, and starring Ben Cross.
• "Barbara of the House of Grebe" (12 December, 1973 BBC2), adapted by David Mercer, directed by David Jones, and starring Nick Brimble and Ben Kingsley. This story is from Hardy's collection A Group of Noble Dames.

The episodes were filmed entirely on location and on 16mm film, rather like the BBC adaptations of Ghost Stories for Christmas as opposed to the interiors being filmed inside a television studio on tape rather like Doctor Who or Poldark.

External links

• Wessex Tales at IMDb
• Wessex Tales public domain audiobook at LibriVox