Wessex Tales and "The Melancholy Hussar of the German Legion"—from "Life's Little Ironies" to "Wessex Tales". Six of the short stories were adapted as television dramas by the BBC as the anthology series called "Wessex Tales": 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 marriage and its inherent restrictions, the use of grammar as a diluted form of thought, the disparities created by the role of class status in
Wessex their home county of Dorset and its neighbouring counties in the south and west of England. Hardy's Wessex excluded Gloucestershire and Oxfordshire, but the city of Oxford, which he called "Christminster", was visited as part of Wessex in "Jude the Obscure". He gave each of his Wessex counties a fictionalised name, such as with Berkshire, which is known in the novels as "North Wessex". The film "Shakespeare in Love" included a character called "Lord Wessex" – a title which did not exist in Elizabethan times. The ITV television series "Broadchurch" takes place in the Wessex area, primarily the county of