The Hand of Ethelberta

Written by Thomas Hardy

Narrated by Fenella Woolgar

Opportunistic, shrewd and beautiful, Ethelberta resolves to disguise her humble beginnings and elevate her position in society. Crafting her career as a society poet and staging her family as her servants, she proves admirably adept at sustaining her own web of deceit as she reinvents herself and navigates the attentions of four different suitors. The wealthiest is not the one she loves... what will she do? This is a light-hearted, urban tale, offering a different side of Thomas Hardy. The master of pastoral realist novels was presenting a ‘somewhat frivolous narrative’, which nevertheless displayed his acute consciousness of class divisions and continues to delight those who discover it within his better-known works.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naxos Audiobooks
• Release date: Feb 17, 2023
• ISBN: 9781781984284

Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in Dorchester, Dorset. He enrolled as a student in King’s College, London, but never felt at ease there, seeing himself as socially inferior. This preoccupation with society, particularly the declining rural society, featured heavily in Hardy’s novels, with many of his stories set in the fictional county of Wessex. Since his death in 1928, Hardy has been recognised as a significant poet, influencing The Movement poets in the 1950s and 1960s.