Thomas Hardy: Under the Greenwood Tree. Ed. Simon Gatrell (The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. cxlvi + 406.

• Jan Rupp

In the first collected edition of Thomas Hardy’s novels, Under the Greenwood Tree was published last. It appeared as the sixteenth and last volume of the landmark ‘Wessex Novels’ edition, released from 1895 to 1896. The Cambridge Edition of the Novels and Stories of Thomas Hardy (published from 2019) restores pride of place to “the first of his great series of Wessex novels” (jacket). Under the Greenwood Tree has appeared as a first instalment of this new edition, together with Hardy’s debut novel Desperate Remedies and The Woodlanders, and to be followed by The Return of the Native (scheduled for release in 2021) in what will be a set of eighteen volumes in total.