Under the Greenwood Tree

＂Miss Fancy Day; as neat a little figure of fun as ever I see, and just husband-high.＂

One of the most popular of Hardy’s novels, Under the Greenwood Tree is a delightful and humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. The story delicately balances the concerns of the Mellstock parish choir with a romance between the village schoolmistress and a member of the choir. Hardy thought well enough of the tale to place it among his Novels of Character and Environment, a group with includes his most characteristic work.

This freshly reset second edition features a new introduction by Phillip Mallett, who explores the tension in the novel between a vanishing rural idyll and the social realities making change inevitable; the novel’s portrait of rural life and character; its revealing textual history and the relation of art to elegy. This edition also features new, expanded notes which provide historical background, gloss dialect and unfamiliar terms, and highlight significant revisions.

Lastly, both the introduction and the notes take into account the substantial critical discussion that has taken place in the 27 years since the edition was first published. The book also includes maps of Hardy’s Wessex and the fictional setting of Mellstock, a new and up-to-date bibliography, and a thorough chronology.

About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World’s Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford’s commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Phillip Mallett has published widely on Hardy and has edited The Mayor of Casterbridge and The Return of the Native for Norton. He is the editor of Thomas Hardy in Context (CUP, 2012), and of the Thomas Hardy Journal and the Hardy Society Journal. He has written the introduction to Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford (OUP, 2010).