Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0141032839, Paperback)
As Baptista travels home to marry her parents' old neighbour, she encounters her lost lover. They elope together, but tragedy strikes unexpectedly on their wedding day and she returns to her parents to do her duty. Will her other, brief love remain a secret? United by the theme of love, the writings in the "Great Loves" series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love, not to mention lost love, twisted and obsessional love...
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 04 Jan 2013 17:16:28 -0500)
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Wikipedia in English
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All the stories are very evocative of the Victorian Era, and are a great introduction to Hardy's work.
"A Mere Interlude"
A young schoolmistress agrees to marry her much-older neighbor to escape the life of a spinster teacher. On the way back home she meets an old flame who she quickly marries, but when disaster strikes on their wedding day she has a quick decision to make--and a devastating secret to keep...
"An Imaginative Woman"
An aspiring poet is caught in a stifling marriage, and on her family's summer vacation they rent a set of rooms belonging to a contemporary poet. The wife finds herself falling in love with a man she has never met, and she will have to choose between her kindred spirit and her family...passion or duty...
"The Withered Arm"
Perhaps Hardy's most famous short story--when a wealthy farmer marries a beautiful young wife, his former lover, (and mother of his illegitimate child) unwittingly "curses" the new wife...and everyone she both loves and hates will bear the consequences... (