Thomas Hardy's 'Life's Little Ironies'

Such is the crazy pace of my life that I read this collection of Thomas Hardy short stories over the course of a couple of months while travelling to and from work on a tram in Warsaw.

For me, there are two stand out tales in this collection of short stories.  First, there is 'To Please his Wife' which is the usual but still deeply moving tale about the cruelty of fate.  To try to go up in the world, Joanna sends her sailor husband and two sons out to seek their fortune on a ship, and the rest is Hardy-type history, very predictable but still moving.

Second, there is 'The Winters and the Palmleys' from the 'A Few Crusted Characters' sequence of tales within 'Life's Little Ironies'.  This is like a less dramatic and less Gothic version of 'The Withered Arm' from Hardy's 'Wessex Tales' collection.  And yet the predictable 'tragedy of human fate' theme is still deeply moving.

In the Wordsworth Classics version, there's a wonderful 'lit-crit' introduction to 'Life's Little Ironies' written by Dr. Claire Seymour.  Here, the latter praises Hardy's 3rd person narrative voice for its "poignant estimate of human nature, the brooding sense of wonder at the essential mystery of life".  She also explains that the tales which make up 'Life's Little Ironies' were written between 1890 and 1893 when Hardy was writing 'Tess' and 'Jude' so it's little surprise that he was pre-occupied with such themes as:  "the pain caused by loveless marriage   . . .   the connection between education, the Church and upward social mobility  . . .  the failure of modern marriage as an institution for formalising and stabilising sexual relationships, and the insidious effects of social ambition on the family and community life".  Needless to say, the rest of this Introduction to 'Life's Little Ironies' is well worth a read.