"Miss Fancy Day; as neat a little figure of fun as ever I see, and just husband-high."One of the most popular of Hardy's novels, Under the Greenwood Tree is a delightful and humorous depiction of life in an early Victorian rural community. The story delicately balances the concerns of the Mellstock parish choir with a romance between the village schoolmistress and a member of the choir. Hardy thought well enough of the tale to place it among his Novels of Character and Environment, a group with includes his most characteristic work. This freshly reset second edition features a new introduction by Phillip Mallett, who explores the tension in the novel between a vanishing rural idyll and the social realities making change inevitable; the novel's portrait of rural life and character; its revealing textual history and the relation of art to elegy.
