See if she is dark or fair, and if you can, notice if her hands be white;
if not, see if they look as though she had ever done housework, or are
milker's hands like mine. So Rhoda Brook, the abandoned mistress of Farmer
Lodge, is jealous to discover details of his new bride in 'The Withered
Arm', the title story in this selection of Hardy's finest short stories.
Hardy's first story, 'Destiny and a Blue Cloak' was written fresh from the
success of Far From the Madding Crowd. Beautiful in their own right, these
stories are also testing-grounds for the novels in their controversial
sexual politics, their refusal of romance structures, and their elegiac
pursuit of past, lost loves. Several of the stories in The Withered Arm
were collected to form the famous volume, Wessex Tales (1888), the first
time Hardy denoted 'Wessex' to describe his fictional world. The Withered
Arm is the first of a new two-volume selection of Hardy's short stories,
edited with an introduction and notes by Kristin Brady.