Outside the Gates of the World: Selected Short Stories

Tales of love lost and revenge won; of passions stifled and creed observed; of ‘things eternal and universal’. Such are the everyday themes of Hardy’s extraordinary stories woven in fine folkloric fashion around the enigmatic personages of the milkmaid and her burgher, the widow and the preacher, the hangman and his victim.

The distracted preacher
Fellow-townsmen
The Honourable Laura
The three strangers
The romantic adventures of a milkmaid
A tryst at an ancient earthwork
The withered arm
Barbara of the House of Grebe
The son’s veto
On the Western Circuit
The fiddler of the reels
An imaginative woman