A ne'er-do-well exploits his gentle daughter's beauty for social advancement in this masterpiece of tragic fiction. Hardy's 1891 novel defied convention to focus on the rural lower class for a frank treatment of sexuality and religion. Then and now, his sympathetic portrait of a victim of Victorian hypocrisy offers compelling reading.
"In the small Wessex village of Mellstock, the pretty young schoolmistress Fancy Day finds herself romantically entangled with three different men. Local lad and choir member Dick Dewy has to compete for her affections with a prosperous farmer and the new vicar, the Reverend Maybold. Maybold disrupts parish life and custom when he decides to replace the three generations of singers and instrumentalists who make up the church choir with a modern organ, to be played by Fancy herself. The rivalries and intrigues that follow are played out with gentle humour against an untouched rural scene that will not long survive. Looking back to the 1840s, and the world Hardy remembered as a child, Under the Greenwood Tree brings past and present, community and individual, loss and gain into perspective"--From back cover.