<p><strong>Wessex Tales is a collection of tales written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840.</strong></p><p>In addition to his great "Wessex Novels," Thomas Hardy wrote <em>Wessex Tales</em> (1896), a collection of six stories written in the 1880s and 1890s that, for the most part, are as bleakly ironic and unforgiving as the darkest of his great novels -- <em>Jude the Obscure.</em> But this great novelist began and ended his writing career as a poet. In-between, he wrote a number of books that many readers find emotionally-wrenching, but which are considered among the classics of 19th Century British literature, including <em>Far from the Madding Crowd,</em> and <em>Tess of the D'Urbervilles.</em></p>