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Desperate Remedies

by Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)

  • Free to read
  • 9 hours to read
  • 21 chapters
  • Reading level: 7th grade

"Desperate Remedies" by Thomas Hardy is a sensation novel published in 1871. Cytherea Graye, forced into service by poverty, must navigate forbidden love, dark family secrets, and dangerous deceptions. When she reluctantly marries the mysterious Aeneas Manston after his wife reportedly dies in a fire, shocking revelations emerge about murder, impersonation, and blackmail. Hardy's first published novel weaves gothic elements with Victorian intrigue, building to a climactic confrontation that will determine whether love can survive desperate circumstances.

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  • Young women
  • Love stories
  • Wessex (England)
  • Lady's maids

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I. The Events of Thirty Years: 1. December and January, 1835-36

In the long and intricately inwrought chain of circumstance which renders worthy of record some experiences of Cytherea Graye, Edward Springrove, and others, the first event directly influencing the issue was a Christmas visit.

In the above-mentioned year, 1835, Ambrose Graye, a young architect who had just begun the practice of his profession in the midland town of Hocbridge, to the north of Christminster, went to London to spend the Christmas holidays with a friend who lived in Bloomsbury. They had gone up to Cambridge in the same year, and, after graduating together, Huntway, the friend, had taken orders.

Graye was handsome, frank, and gentle. He had a quality of thought which, exercised on homeliness, was humour; on nature, picturesqueness; on abstractions, poetry. Being, as a rule, broadcast, it was all three.

Of the wickedness of the world he was too forgetful. To discover evil in a new friend is to most people only an additional experience: to him it was ever a surprise.

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Contents

  1. I. The Events of Thirty Years: 1. December and January, 1835-36
  2. II. The Events of a Fortnight: 1. The Ninth of July
  3. III. The Events of Eight Days: 1. From the Twenty-Second to the Twenty-Seventh of July
  4. IV. The Events of One Day: 1. August the Fourth. Till Four O’clock
  5. V. The Events of One Day: 1. August the Eighth. Morning and Afternoon
  6. VI. The Events of Twelve Hours: 1. August the Ninth. One to Two O’clock a.M
  7. VII. The Events of Eighteen Days: 1. August the Seventeenth
  8. VIII. The Events of Eighteen Days: 1. From the Third to the Nineteenth of September
  9. IX. The Events of Ten Weeks: 1. From September the Twenty-First to the Middle of November
  10. X. The Events of a Day and Night: 1. November the Twenty-Eighth. Until Ten P.M
  11. XI. The Events of Five Days: 1. November the Twenty-Ninth
  12. XII. The Events of Ten Months: 1. December to April
  13. XIII. The Events of One Day: 1. The Fifth of January. Before Dawn
  14. XIV. The Events of Five Weeks: 1. From the Sixth to the Thirteenth of January
  15. XV. The Events of Three Weeks: 1. From the Twelfth of February to the Second of March
  16. XVI. The Events of One Week: 1. March the Sixth
  17. XVII. The Events of One Day: 1. March the Thirteenth. Three to Six O’clock a.M
  18. XVIII. The Events of Three Days: 1. March the Eighteenth
  19. XIX. The Events of a Day and Night: 1. March the Twenty-First. Morning
  20. XX. The Events of Three Hours: 1. March the Twenty-Third. Midday
  21. XXI. The Events of Eighteen Hours: 1. March the Twenty-Ninth. Noon

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About this edition

This free edition of Desperate Remedies by Thomas Hardy comes from Project Gutenberg eBook #3044, released 2004-10-02. It is in the public domain in the United States, so you can read it here in full at no cost, on any phone, tablet or computer. Genre: Romance, Novels, British Literature.

Summary provided by Project Gutenberg (automatically generated).

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