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Woman Much Missed
Woman Much Missed
Sep 11, 2025 8:08 PM

Author:Thomas Hardy

Woman Much Missed

'Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me...'

After the death of his wife Emma, a grief-stricken Hardy wrote some of the best verse of his career. Moving and evocative, it ranks among the greatest elegiac poetry in the language.

Introducing Little Black Classics: 80 books for Penguin's 80th birthday. Little Black Classics celebrate the huge range and diversity of Penguin Classics, with books from around the world and across many centuries. They take us from a balloon ride over Victorian London to a garden of blossom in Japan, from Tierra del Fuego to 16th-century California and the Russian steppe. Here are stories lyrical and savage; poems epic and intimate; essays satirical and inspirational; and ideas that have shaped the lives of millions.

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928). Hardy's works available in Penguin Classics are A Laodicean, A Pair of Blue Eyes, Desperate Remedies, Far from the Madding Crowd, Jude the Obscure, Selected Poems, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, The Distracted Preacher and Other Tales, The Fiddler of the Reels and Other Stories, The Hand of Ethelberta, The Mayor of Casterbridge, The Pursuit of the Well-beloved and The Well-beloved, The Return of the Native, The Trumpet-Major, The Withered Arm and Other Stories, The Woodlanders, Two on a Tower and Under the Greenwood Tree.

Reviews

Virginia Woolf was one of the great innovators of that decade of literary Modernism, the 1920s. Novels such as Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse showed how experimental writing could reshape our sense of ordinary life. Taking unremarkable materials - preparations for a genteel party, a day on a bourgeois family holiday - they trace the flow of associations and ideas that we call "consciousness"

—— Guardian

Virginia Woolf stands as the chief figure of modernism in England and must be included with Joyce and Proust in the realisation of experimental achievements that have completely broken with tradition

—— New York Times

Virginia Woolf was a great writer. Her voice is distinctive; her style is her own; her work is an active influence on other writers and a subtle influence on what we have come to expect from modern literature

—— Jeanette Winterson

[Johnson's] an astute observer of the social nuances of segregated America and Mississippi itself.

—— Daily Mail

Breakout Title: Add Deborah Johnson's addictive The Secret of Magic to your bookshelf.

—— Stylist

Written with such charm that it is a beguiling read...A wonderful and clever read. Four stars.

—— The Lady

Beguiling... An absorbing, entertaining read: one that will see you nicely through a few long dark evenings

—— A Life in Books

An emotionally powerful, highly charged story... a fascinating story with an intriguing premise

—— CultureFly

Like eavesdropping on a conversation in a bar...This is a really cleverly structured and well-crafted novel

—— We Love This Book

An intriguing drama and romance

—— Daily Record

This is a harrowing, but gripping love story

—— Good Book Guide

Wonderfully enticing.

—— Lucian Robinson , Literary Review

Individual scenes are often gripping, shocking or moving.

—— John Harding , Daily Mail

The bloody horrors of conflict are captured with visceral aplomb in this fine, minimalist novel.

—— i

Some of the most vividly evoked battle scenes I've read – he doesn't shy away from taking risks … chilling and touching all at the same time.

—— John Preston , Evening Standard

Foulds has the literary intelligence to turn the commonplace on its head.

—— Alberto Manguel , Guardian

A high-class thriller … Foulds has a literary novelist's feel for [Sicily's] harsh beauty.

—— Mail on Sunday

Foulds’ prose is superb… It reads like Catch-22 written by Evelyn Waugh.

—— Good Book Guide

It’s an ambitious book and the writer relates his story with poetic precision

—— i (The paper for today)

Told in a language that is both lyrical and stark The Tusk that Did the Damage should win Tania James praise and laurels from those readers who long for a more penetrating look at environmental issues and the moral questions which accompany them’.

—— Joe Phelan , Bookmunch
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