Under the Greenwood Tree

Thomas Hardy

May 2023 · Xist Publishing · AI-narrated by Marcus (from Google)

About this audiobook

A Novel Entangled With Music and Love

“Everybody must be managed. Queens must be managed. Kings must be managed, for men want managing almost as much as women, and that's saying a good deal.” - Thomas Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree

Life in the English village of Mellstock is about to change when a mechanical organ is brought to the local church. Of course, there is also a need for an organist and that is where beautiful, highly-educated Fancy Day comes in. Replacing the church’s choir however is more difficult than it seems, especially when a member of the choir, Dick falls for Fancy at first sight.

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About the author

Thomas Hardy, OM, was an English author of the naturalist movement, although in several poems he displays elements of the previous romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his fascination with the supernatural. He regarded himself primarily as a poet and composed novels mainly for financial gain. The bulk of his work, set mainly in the semi-fictional land of Wessex, delineates characters struggling against their passions and circumstances. Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as well regarded as his novels, especially after The Movement of the 1950s and 1960s. The term cliffhanger is considered to have originated with Thomas Hardy's serial novel A Pair of Blue Eyes in 1873. In the novel, Hardy chose to leave one of his protagonists, Knight, literally hanging off a cliff staring into the stony eyes of a trilobite embedded in the rock that has been dead for millions of years. This became the archetypal — and literal — cliff-hanger of Victorian prose.