In the Library
The Trumpet-Major
Thomas Hardy, 1880
- Form
- Form Novel
- Difficulty
- Difficulty Moderate
- Reading time
- Reading time 8 hours
- Chapters
- Chapters 42
- Length
- Length 113k words
£1.99
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The admiral’s flag sank behind the watery line, and in a minute the very truck of the last topmast stole away. The Victory was gone.
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If you like this, try
Far from the Madding Crowd
Thomas Hardy
Hardy arranges three men around one woman in the same Wessex fields, but there the patient one is allowed to keep her.
£1.99
Persuasion
Jane Austen
Austen writes the same navy and the same long waiting, but gives her constant lover the second chance Hardy quietly refuses his.
£1.99
Vanity Fair
William Makepeace Thackeray
Thackeray watches the same war from the drawing rooms and the road to Brussels, but his young men are vain and Waterloo does not forgive them.
£1.99
About the book
One morning the down above Overcombe turns white with canvas, and the mill wakes to find the King's dragoons camped on its doorstep, Napoleon expected on the shingle any night that summer. Nothing else in Hardy stays this happy for this long. Anne Garland has three men after her: a loud yeoman who is all bluster, a sailor brother who is all charm and no constancy, and John Loveday, the trumpet-major, who loves her better than either and will not say so while his brother wants her. Hardy understood something unbearable about that kind of goodness: it costs the good man everything and buys him nothing. The comedy is real, the volunteers drilling badly, the King bathing at Weymouth while a band in the next machine strikes up as his head comes out of the sea. So is the morning Anne climbs the cliff and watches the Victory take the sailor out of sight toward Trafalgar. And so is the last door in the book, and the dark on the other side of it.