"The Three Strangers" is a

short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest ...

Thomas Hardy Thomas Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was an English novelist and poet. A Victorian realist in the tradition of George Eliot, he was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by Romanticism, including the poetry of William Wor ...

from 1883.

Background

The story is a pastoral history told by an

omniscient narrator Narration is the use of a written or spoken commentary to convey a story to an audience. Narration is conveyed by a narrator: a specific person, or unspecified literary voice, developed by the creator of the story to deliver information to the ...

more than 50 years after the event. The sheep-stealer is a kind of folk hero who stole to survive and escaped by outsmarting his hangman. Casterbridge was the name for Dorchester in

Thomas Hardy's Wessex Thomas Hardy's Wessex is the fictional literary landscape created by the English author Thomas Hardy as the setting for his major novels, located in the south and southwest of England. Hardy named the area "Wessex" after the medieval Anglo-Saxo ...

Publication

"The Three Strangers" was published in ''

Longman's Magazine ''Longman's Magazine'' was first published in November 1882 by C. J. Longman, publisher of Longmans, Green & Co. of London. It superseded '' Fraser's Magazine'' (published 1830 to 1882). A total of 276 monthly issues had been published when the ...

'' and ''

Harper's Weekly ''Harper's Weekly, A Journal of Civilization'' was an American political magazine based in New York City. Published by Harper & Brothers from 1857 until 1916, it featured foreign and domestic news, fiction, essays on many subjects, and humor, ...

'' in March 1883. Five years later it became the first of five stories in Hardy's ''

Wessex Tales ''Wessex Tales'' is an 1888 collection of tales written by English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy, many of which are set before Hardy's birth in 1840. In the various short stories, Hardy writes of the true nature of nineteenth-century marria ...

''.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Three Strangers Works by Thomas Hardy 1883 short stories Works originally published in Harper's Magazine