Thomas Hardy - Under the Greenwood Tree

This is an unabridged version, 73MB, running for 6.7 hours.

Encoded as 32kbps 22050Hz MP3 mono - radio quality

Under the Greenwood Tree or The Mellstock Quire A Rural Painting of the Dutch School is a novel by Thomas Hardy, published anonymously in 1872.

The plot concerns the activities of a group of church musicians, one of whom, Dick Dewy, becomes romantically entangled with a comely new school mistress, Fancy Day. For Dick, it's love at first sight, literally, when he sees her through a window as the choir is making the rounds singing on Christmas Eve. While he, smitten, seeks to insinuate himself into her life and affections, Fancy's beauty has gained her other suitors, including the vicar and a farmer who is trying to get the choir removed in favour of an organ.

Dick's attempts are further hampered by the fact that he becomes incredibly awkward every time he's around Fancy, and that her father frowns on the match. Love triumphs eventually, although she marries with "a secret she would never tell" - namely, that she was also briefly engaged to the local vicar, Parson Maybold.

Whilst this is often seen as Thomas Hardy's most gentle and pastoral novel, this could be seen as undermined by the fact that Fancy and Dick's marriage and subsequent happiness is based on deception, and the fact that Dick comes across as merely infatuated while Fancy seems shallow.

The novel illustrates the development of technology throughout the Victorian era, as the traditional 'Mellstock Quire' (whose plight forms the book's subtitle) are ousted in favour of the more modern and efficient organ.

Read by Robert Whitfield

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