Following on from 'Wessex Tales' last year and 'Life's Little Ironies' earlier this year, 'A Changed Man and Other Tales' is the third anthology of short stories I've read by Thomas Hardy.
I read this lesser-known collection of Hardy short stories in various travelling contexts: commuting to and from work in Warsaw, Poland; flying from Warsaw to Manchester; travelling in a car round county Kerry, Ireland; flying from Frankfurt to Warsaw etc.
It's now 5-6 weeks since I finished reading 'A Changed Man and Other Tales', but I'll try to recall a bit of what I got out of some of the tales as best as I can. 'A Changed Man', the opening short story is a deeply moving tale set in Hardy's 'Casterbridge' (Dorchester) which tells the story of an army officer who marries a local woman and becomes an Anglican clergyman. In response, his wife plots to leave him for another man, but she ends up almost worshipping him as he heroically leads the fight against a cholera outbreak in Casterbridge and ultimately gives his life, almost Christ-like. Here, I sense that Hardy is offering a general truth that people are only really valued once they're gone (and then again, they become forgotten in time).
The 2nd tale, 'The Waiting Supper' had less impact on me. However, afterwards, I was interested to read in Margaret Marande's 'The Hardy Way' (page 194) that its 'Froom Everard House' setting was based on West Stafford House which I passed on my way to West Stafford during my pilgrimage to Hardy's Wessex earlier this summer. The same was the case with the 10th tale, 'The Duke's Reappearance', when I discovered that Hardy's model setting for this story was the village of Melbury Osmond ('The Hardy Way', page 118) which I'd also passed through (and discreetly camped on the village green for a night) during my Hardy pilgrimage this year.
The 3rd tale, 'Alicia's Diary', was probably my least favourite of the tales with Hardy adopting the 1st person narrative voice of a young woman. This reminded me of (albeit a sadder version of) Tolstoy's 'Happy Ever After' which I read many years ago.
Really do have trouble recalling the content of the 11 tales now that a couple of months have elapsed since I read them. However, the 6th tale, 'A Tryst at an Ancient Earthwork' is richly atmospheric as it opens with an incredible description of the site that the narrator is climbing up. This detailed description of a piece of natural environment reminded me a bit of Hardy's truly incredible, opening description of Egdon Heath in 'The Return of the Native' (my first experience of Hardy about 34 years ago when I was 17 or 18).
The 8th tale, 'A Committee Man of "The Terror"', is a dark and unusual, 'almost love story' between a young French woman who has escaped the horrors of the French Revolution only to encounter, in her English safe haven, an older French man who had taken part in the guillotining of some of her family members back in France. For some (possibly deep) inner reason, she doesn't give him away and they both develop feelings towards each other, but fate just subtly sets them worlds apart.
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