Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and
poet. The phrase `life’s little ironies’ is now proverbial, was coined by Hardy as the title for his third volume of short stories. The tales and sketches refl ect many of the strengths and themes of the
great novels of Hardy. The collection displays the whole range of Hardy’s art as a writer of fi ction, from fantasy to uncompromising
realism, and from the loving re-creation of a vanished rural world to the repressions of fi n de siecle bourgeois life.