Desperate remedies / Thomas Hardy ; edited by Richard Nemesvari.

Machine generated contents note: List of illustrations; General editor's preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Abbreviations; Introduction; Desperate Remedies; Editorial emendations; List of variants - accidentals; End-of-line word division; Appendix A. Hardy's prefatory notes; Appendix B. Frontispieces; Appendix C. Description of principal texts; Explanatory notes.

"Thomas Hardy (1840-1928), the Victorian novelist, poet, and short story author, wrote of the struggles and unhappiness caused by the constraints of social convention, particularly in relation to religion, class, education, and marriage. Hardy's first published novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), a piece of sensation fiction that encompasses illegitimacy, murder, blackmail, impersonation, and bigamy, was originally published anonymously. Written while, in Hardy's own words, he was 'feeling his way to a method', it nonetheless contains early examples of the kinds of extreme situations and emotions that continued to play a significant role in his later plots. As part of The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, this edition of the novel provides an authoritative text; full scholarly apparatus that allows the reader to trace Hardy's creative process; an introductory essay discussing the work's composition, publication, and critical reception; and comprehensive explanatory notes"--

"Thomas Hardy's career as an author bridged the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and during that time he could count among his accomplishments fourteen novels, more than nine hundred poems, a little over four dozen pieces of short fiction, and a verse drama in three volumes that took as its topic the Peninsular War and the fall of Napoleon. Yet on the brink of his first great success, the publication of Far from the Madding Crowd in the prestigious Cornhill Magazine, he wrote to its editor Leslie Stephen that, although he might 'have higher aims some day', at that moment he wished 'merely to be considered a good hand at a serial'. It is safe to say that those higher aims were achieved, for after Hardy's Westminster Abbey funeral, and after large crowds had silently filed past his open grave in Poet's Corner, The Times in its obituary for him mourned the loss of English literature's 'most eminent figure'. Hardy's stature as a writer was, and remains, unassailable, and the continuing popularity of his fiction, in both print and other media, attests to his powerful and enduring representation of human experience"--