Wessex Tales is a collection of tales written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840.
In addition to his great "Wessex Novels," Thomas Hardy wrote
Wessex Tales
(1896), a collection of six stories written in the 1880s and 1890s that, for the most part, are as bleakly ironic and unforgiving as the darkest of his great novels --
Jude the Obscure.
But this great novelist began and ended his writing career as a poet. In-between, he wrote a number of books that many readers find emotionally-wrenching, but which are considered among the classics of 19th Century British literature, including
Far from the Madding Crowd,
and
Tess of the D'Urbervilles.