Thomas Hardy is best remembered for his passionate poems and the series of Wessex novels which included Jude the Obscure, Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the Durbevilles. The short story, A Mere Interlude, is an absorbing masterpiece with as many twists and turns as any plot in Hardy. A school teacher from the mainland returns to the island home of her childhood to be married to a man who is not altogether to her liking. But she meets another on her way and, in a moment of wildness, all her plans go seriously awry. This is a story of passion and cover-up; a tale of love, destiny and heroism in the best tradition of Thomas Hardy.

Three short stories on the subject of forbidden loves of one sort or another.
In "A Mere Interlude" a young woman is engaged to marry an older man, but shortly before the day of the wedding, she meets an old flame, and impetuously marries him instead. However, he drowns almost immediately afterward. She decides not to reveal the fact she is a widow and marry her intended anyway.
In "An Imaginative Woman" a married couple on vacation stay in the home of a bachelor, who has left town for a spell. When the wife, who is a closet poet, learns that they are in the home of a renowned poet she idolizes, she begins to fall in love with the man; although she has never met him.
In "The Withered Arm" a young wife is cursed with an inexplicable ailment on one arm. Her friend, who unbeknownst to her fathered a child with this woman before she married him, eventually takes her to see a conjurer, who advises her that the only healing will come with her touching the neck of a freshly hanged man.
"An Imaginative Woman" was my favorite of the three tales, though none were up to par with Hardy's major classic novels. ( )

A lovely collection of three short stories by Thomas Hardy, or as I call him, "The Master of Melancholy".
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... ( )