Book description
'At sight of him had the pink of her cheeks increased, lessened, or
did it continue to cover its normal area of ground? It was a
question meditated several hundreds of times by her visitor in
after-hours - the meditation, after wearying involutions, always
ending in one way, that it was impossible to say'
The arrival of two newcomers in the quiet village of Mellstock
arouses a bitter feud and leaves a convoluted love affair in its wake.
While the Reverend Maybold creates a furore among the village's
musicians with his decision to abolish the church's traditional
'string choir' and replace it with a modern mechanical organ, the new
schoolteacher, Fancy Day, causes an upheaval of a more romantic
nature, winning the hearts of three very different men - a local
farmer, a church musician and Maybold himself. Under the Greenwood
Tree follows the ensuing maze of intrigue and passion with
gentle humour and sympathy, deftly evoking the richness of village
life, yet tinged with melancholy for a rural world that Hardy saw fast disappearing.
The Penguin English Library - 100 editions of the best fiction in
English, from the eighteenth century and the very first novels to the
beginning of the First World War.
