Reviews for Wild hearts

The average rating for Wild hearts based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-12-12 00:00:00 Andrew Dobos By now I think I must have made it fairly obvious that I love Thomas Hardy, and so I was looking forward to my re-reading of this superb collection of Hardy shorter fiction for my on-going Hardy reading challenge. Wessex Tales contains seven stories, the first two of them really very short - the others considerably longer. In this collection Hardy explored familiar themes of marriage and rural life that we see in his novels, but he also experiments rather in a supernatural tale, 'The Withered Arm', which I think I have read at least three times, as it crops up in various other short story collections. The Three Strangers is wonderfully atmospheric, with a delightful little twist, although short it is a perfectly crafted little story, a small isolated cottage, packed with local folk for a celebration, inclement weather and the unexpected arrival of three strangers. 'The Withered Arm' - for me at least - is right up there with the best of the gothic type ghost and supernatural stories. There's a wronged woman, an illegitimate child, a pretty young wife, a curse and a wonderful twist - delicious. Hardy doesn't allow himself to be in anyway curtailed by the genre of the short story - he gives full reign to his imagination, and his characters are fully explored. Hardy presents us with men making foolish and rash decisions in the pursuit of marriage, the women they reject so obviously superior. Using irony, coincidence, comedy and tragedy, devices that are so familiar to readers of his novels, Hardy could quite easily have spun out several of these brilliantly constructed stories into novels. In 'Fellow Townsmen' and 'Interlopers at the Knap' the stories span many years - characters are made to regret the decisions of the past. While in 'The Distracted Preacher', a good man puts his principles to one side in order to help the woman he loves - in a wonderfully atmospheric and slightly comic tale of smugglers. Hardy was very aware of the changing world in which he lived - and in the Wessex Tales it is a world that is presented to us with the great understanding and affection that he had for it. Born and brought up in a humble home Hardy understood the rural world that he wrote about, he understood the work of the furze cutter and the shepherd, he had an ear for the dialect of the region, which he reproduces in many minor characters, characters who no matter how minor they are manage to be completely real. "Is it necessary to add that the echoes of many characteristic tales, dating from that picturesque time, still linger about here, in more or less fragmentary form to be caught by the attentive ear? Some of them I have repeated; most of them I have forgotten; one I have never repeated, and assuredly can never forget." Hardy even manages to lend some of his stories an air of traditional folklore - the story being re-told by a nameless narrator after a passage of time. I wonder if it these were the kind of stories that Hardy would have grown up hearing. Although I do love Hardy's pastoral novels best, I think his shorter fiction to be very well worth reading, and wonder if it doesn't sometimes get overlooked a little. I actually think that The Wessex Tales wouldn't be a bad place to start for those who have never read any Thomas Hardy.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-11-29 00:00:00 Laura Kincaid A ready enjoyable read - a lot of great stories, and some quite different to other Hardy works, more influenced by the gothic, etc. I especially loved the story 'An Imaginative Woman'.