Winter Words

Written by Thomas Hardy

Narrated by Bruce Alexander and Janet Maw

This selection of Hardy’s poetry does full justice to its humanity, integrity, humour and evocative power, ranging from charming anthology pieces such as ‘Weathers’ to the great love poems he wrote after the death of his first wife and the meditations on war and philosophy. The poems – nearly eighty in total – are set in the context of his life and thought, including personal writings by him and those closest to him.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Jan 1, 2006
• ISBN: 9789629546564

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in Dorset in 1840, the eldest of four children. At the age of sixteen he became an apprentice architect. With remarkable self discipline he developed his classical education by studying between the hours of four and eight in the morning. With encouragement from Horace Moule of Queens' College Cambridge, he began to write fiction. His first published novel was Desperate Remedies in 1871. Thus began a series of increasingly dark novels all set within the rural landscape of his native Dorset, called Wessex in the novels. Such was the success of his early novels, including A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) and Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), that he gave up his work as an architect to concentrate on his writing. However he had difficulty in getting Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1889) published and was forced to make changes in order for it to be judged suitable for family readers. This coupled with the stormy reaction to the negative tone of Jude the Obscure (1894) prompted Hardy to abandon novel writing altogether. He concentrated mainly on poetry in his latter years. He died in January 1928 and was buried in Westminster Abbey; but his heart, in a separate casket, was buried in Stinsford, Dorset.