The Trumpet-Major

Hardy's only historical novel is also his most unexpectedly gentle. Set in a Wessex village bracing for Napoleon's invasion, The Trumpet-Major follows Anne Garland, the daughter of a mill widow, as she navigates a tangle of suitors amid the drumbeats of war. John Loveday, the trumpet-major himself, is steady and true; his brother Bob, a sailor, is charming but unreliable; Festus Derriman, the squire's nephew, is a coward whose ambitions mask something darker. What unfolds is both a love story and a meditation on how history intrudes upon ordinary life, pulling young men toward Trafalgar and Wellington's campaigns while the women they leave behind hold down the home front. Hardy writes with his characteristic eye for landscape and social nuance, but the tone here is lighter than his later, bleaker works. There is irony, there is comedy, there is the absurd posturing of those who mistake their own importance. Yet the shadow of history falls across everything, and the novel refuses to pretend that individual happiness is immune to the currents of fate. It is Hardy at his most playful and his most poignant.