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  • Published: 23 October 1998
  • ISBN: 9780140435238
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $28.00
Categories:

Desperate Remedies




Desperate Remedies was Hardy's first published work, and combines murder mystery with a powerful love story.

Hardy described Desperate Remedies as a tale of 'mystery, entanglement, surprise and moral obliquity'.

Cytherea has taken a position as lady's maid to the eccentric arch-intriguer Miss Aldclyffe. On discovering that the man she loves, Edward Springrove, is already engaged to his cousin, Cytherea comes under the influence of Miss Aldclyffe's fascinating, manipulative steward Manston.
Blackmail, murder and romance are among the ingredients of Hardy's first published novel, and in it he draws blithely on the 'sensation novel' perfected by Wilkie Collins. Several perceptive critics praised the author as a novelist with a future when Desperate Remedies appeared anonymously in 1871. In its depiction of country life and insight into psychology and sexuality it already bears the unmistakable imprint of Hardy's genius.

  • Published: 23 October 1998
  • ISBN: 9780140435238
  • Imprint: Penguin Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 512
  • RRP: $28.00
Categories:

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Persuasion
The Black Tulip
The Lady of the Camellias
On Sparta
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Annals
Military Dispatches