Product Description
ReadHowYouWant publishes a wide variety of best selling books in Large and Super Large fonts in partnership with leading publishers. EasyRead books are available in 11pt and 13pt. type. EasyRead Large books are available in 16pt, 16pt Bold, and 18pt Bold type. EasyRead Super Large books are available in 20pt. Bold and 24pt. Bold Type. You choose the format that is right for you.

Here, a modern romance is presented by Hardy in a beautiful manner. Set in a supernatural background, he presents a tale drenched in mystery and vagueness. With skillfully drawn characters, this is one of the shorter works by Hardy. It bespeaks of his skills at writing and putting across his ideas beautifully.

To find more titles in your format, Search in Books using EasyRead and the size of the font that makes reading easier and more enjoyable for you.



About the Author
Thomas Hardy was a poet and novelist of the naturalist movement. He trained as an architect. He was a religious man who was also deeply influenced by Darwin and fascinated by ghosts and spirits.During his lifetime, he was best known for his novels. His stories combine nuanced description of natural surroundings with the sense of impending moral crisis. He claimed that poetry was his first love, though, and in recent years his poetry has received much critical acclaim. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Excellent Story, Questionable Edition
"The Romantic Adventures of a Milkmaid" is one of Thomas Hardy's great shorter works, a novella that probably influenced his novels more than any other short story. It is well worth reading by itself, but the fact that it is in so many collections - e.g., The Withered Arm and Other Stories - makes it hard to justify a standalone, especially as some collections cost little or no more than this. Anyone interested in Hardy should read it but not necessarily here.

The story is in many ways a prototype for Tess of the D'Urbervilles and the contemporaneous short stories in A Group of Noble Dames, not least in its female protagonist. Hardy portrays farm labor's harsh reality with stunning realism, and the contrast with rich society life is movingly striking. However, the story also has obvious fairy tale elements; this combination and the intermediate length make it unique. It is on one level among Hardy's most affecting and thought-provoking rural poverty depictions, but there are many other dark elements. Its portrayal of love as an essentially self-destructive force leading to hopeless obsession anticipates his late novelistic masterpieces, and the ambiguous Baron is one of Hardy's most fascinating characters. He is in one sense a hedonistic creature of almost pure, even archetypal, evil like Desperate Remedies' Aeneas Manston or Tess' Alec D'Urberville, yet deep melancholy and a tragic nature make him sympathetic. The plot is deliberately one of Hardy's least realistic, but the symbolism - not least in regard to class issues - inherent in his encounters with the milkmaid is patent, and the tackling of higher themes is well-executed. Like Paula Power in A Laodicean, the Baron's nature is essentially ambivalent, and so is the story's conclusion. Hardy later significantly revised it, but this tantalizing yet undeniably appealing quality remained. This is in many ways one of his most subtly complex works and also one of his most overlooked - well worth looking into, however one chooses to read it.
... Read more