Under the Greenwood Tree

Under the Greenwood Tree interweaves the lingering courtship of Dick Dewy and sweet Fancy Day with the battle for survival of the old string choir -- the last in the county -- against the mechanical church organ of the new vicar. Set amid the farms and woodlands of Mellstock, this sunlit and good-humored pastoral romance came to epitomize for Hardy an irrecoverable English past. This new Penguin Classics edition, based on the two-volume first edition of 1872, includes appendices that reflect the unique textual history of the novel.