Life's Little Ironies
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/c/cc/LifesLittleIronies.jpg/220px-LifesLittleIronies.jpg)
(publ. Osgood, McIlvaine and Co.)
Life's Little Ironies is a collection of tales written by Thomas Hardy, originally published in 1894,[1][2] and republished with a slightly different collection of stories, for the Uniform Edition in 1927/8.
1927 edition contents
- An Imaginative Woman
- The Son's Veto
- For Conscience' Sake
- A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions
- On the Western Circuit
- To Please His Wife
- The Fiddler of the Reels
- A Few Crusted Characters—
- Introduction
- Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver
- The History of the Hardcomes
- The Superstitious Man's Story
- Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk
- Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician
- Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir
- The Winters and the Palmleys
- Incident in the Life of Mr. George Crookhill
- Netty Sargent's Copyhold
There is a Prefatory Note to the revised edition, written by the author, which says this of the above contents: “Of the following collection the first story, ‘An Imaginative Woman’, originally stood in Wessex Tales, but was brought into this volume as being more nearly its place, turning as it does upon a trick of Nature, so to speak, a physical possibility that may attach to a wife of vivid imaginings, as is well known to medical practitioners and other observers of such manifestations. The two stories named ‘A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four’ and 'The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion’, which were formerly printed in this series, were also transferred to Wessex Tales, where they more naturally belong. The above alterations were first made in the Uniform Edition in 1927. The present narratives and sketches, though separately published at various antecedent dates, were first collected and issued in a volume in 1894. T.H.”
The original collection came out as a pocket edition in 1907 (reprinted nine times); the 1927 revision was reset and issued 1928 (reprinted 1929, 1937, 1953). Six of the stories (excluding "To Please His Wife" and "A Few Crusted Characters") appeared in the Penguin Classic The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories.
Film and TV adaptations
Two of the short stories were adapted as one-off TV dramas by the BBC in the 1973 anthology Wessex Tales:
- A Tragedy of Two Ambitions (21 November 1973 / BBC2)
- An Imaginative Woman (28 November 1973 / BBC2).
References
- Hardy, Thomas (1953). Life's Little Ironies. Macmillan and Co., Limited. p. 268.
External links
- Life's Little Ironies at Project Gutenberg
Life's Little Ironies public domain audiobook at LibriVox
- v
- t
- e
- The Poor Man and the Lady (1867)
- Desperate Remedies (1871)
- Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
- A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874)
- The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
- The Return of the Native (1878)
- The Trumpet-Major (1880)
- A Laodicean (1881)
- Two on a Tower (1882)
- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
- The Woodlanders (1887)
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891/92)
- Jude the Obscure (1895)
- The Well-Beloved (1897)
- Wessex Tales (1888)
- A Group of Noble Dames (1891)
- Life's Little Ironies (1894)
- A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913)
- "The Three Strangers" (1883)
- "A Mere Interlude" (1885)
- "Alicia's Diary" (1887)
- "Barbara of the House of Grebe" (1891)
- "The Fiddler of the Reels" (1893)
- "A Tragedy of Two Ambitions" (1894)
- Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898)
- Poems of the Past and the Present (1901)
- Time's Laughingstocks (1909)
- Poems 1912–13
- Satires of Circumstance (1914)
- Moments of Vision (1917)
- Late Lyrics (1922)
- Human Shows (1925)
- Winter Words (1928)
- "Neutral Tones" (1898)
- "The Darkling Thrush" (1900)
- "The Ruined Maid" (1901)
- "The Respectable Burgher" (1901)
- "The Man He Killed" (1902)
- "A Trampwoman's Tragedy" (1903)
- "The Convergence of the Twain" (1915)
- "The Blinded Bird" (1916)
- The Dynasts (1904–1908)
- The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923)
- Thomas Hardy's Wessex
- Winter Words (song cycle)
![]() | This article about a collection of short stories published in the 1890s is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
- v
- t
- e