Historical Fiction Hardy, Thomas: The Trumpet Major, v1, 9 Apr 2015

[AlexBell]

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840, less than six months after his parents married. He was a sickly child and a short adult, and prone to become infatuated by young women throughout his life. He could not afford to go to university to become an Anglican minister, and worked as an architectural apprentice, draughtsman, or architect until his first accepted novel was published at his expense in 1871, followed by another thirteen novels and four collections of short stories.

The main themes in his fiction include the problems encountered when people of different social status fall in love and when two men compete with one another for for one woman, and the difficulties men and women have in understanding each other.

The Trumpet Major was his seventh novel, published in 1880 in a censored version in the Good Words magazine and as the full version by Smith, Elder. It is a historical story set in the Napoleonic Wars from the threatened invasion from Boulogne to the beginning of the Peninsular war, and deals with the relationships of three men and two women and how they are affected by their personalities. It is not as bleak as most of his work.

The source text cannot be named as I have corrected typos and replaced diacritics and italics after checking against the Sampson Low 1890 edition and the MacMillan and Co. 1915 edition of the Wessex Novels. I have made changes to spelling, punctuation, and hyphenation using oxforddictionaries.com.

HarryT did an illustrated edition in 2008. I hope my version will find a place as it contains a later mobi version

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