Under the Greenwood Tree

Hardy's second published novel, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), the first of his great series of Wessex novels, was originally published anonymously. As part of the Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy, this edition of the novel provides readers with an authoritative and accurate text of the novel; moreover it gives access to every revision that Hardy made, and to notations of all the errors introduced by printers' compositors. The annotated text is surrounded by an introduction that gives a very full account of the genesis, the writing and the publishing history of the novel. A range of appendices and comprehensive explanatory notes explore significant aspects of the composition, production and marketing of the novel, touched on in the introduction, to provide a full understanding of the nature and life of this classic work.

List of illustrations; General editor's preface; Acknowledgements; Chronology; Abbreviations; Introduction; Under the Greenwood Tree; Variants in punctuation and styling; End-of-line hyphenation; Editorial emendations; Appendix A. Hardy's preface to the Wessex Edition; Appendix B. Under the Greenwood Tree and The Poor Man and the Lady; Appendix C. Detailed analysis of the manuscript; Appendix D. Chapter-division in the manuscript; Appendix E. Watermarks in the manuscript; Appendix F. The compositors of the first edition; Appendix G. Robson's compositors in A Pair of Blue Eyes; Appendix H. Differences between the first and second editions; Appendix I. Printing orders for Under the Greenwood Tree Published by Chatto and Windus and Macmillan; Appendix J. Frontispieces; Appendix K. Description of substantive editions; Explanatory notes.

Simon Gatrell is Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He has previously published critical editions of Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1986) and The Return of the Native (1990), both in the Hardy series of Oxford World Classics for which he was also General Editor. Professor Gatrell is also author of Hardy the Creator: A Textual Biography (1988), Thomas Hardy and the Proper Study of Mankind (1993), Thomas Hardy's Vision of Wessex (2003) and Thomas Hardy Writing Dress (2011).