A Group of Noble Dames

Thomas Hardy pays tribute to the triumphs and tribulations of patrician Englishwomen in his collection of short stories, A Group of Noble Dames.
Around the fire at an inn, sheltering from a storm, the members of the Wessex Field and Antiquarian Club are each entreated to tell a story. The men all tell tales of women, the 'Noble Dames' of the title, from the Countess of Wessex to the Duchess of Hamptonshire. The lives of these fictional dames are imagined by Hardy based on clues from real-life genealogies and archival family records.
Inventive and detailed, these stories confirm why Hardy is one of the most enduring and best-loved writers of the 19th Century.

Thomas Tough (June 2, 1840-January 11, 1928) was born in England. He was a British author and poet. He was the son of a country carpenter and builder. He practiced architecture before starting with poetry and books. Several of his books, starting with his second, Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), are set in the imaginary county of Wessex. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his first famous work was followed by The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). Hardy's works were progressively at odds with Victorian morality, and public anger at Jude so disgusted him that he wrote no more books. He got back to poetry with Wessex poems (1898), Poems of the Past and the Present (1901), and The Dynasts (1910), a large poetic drama of the Napoleonic Wars.