"The Withered Arm" rivals "Fellow-Townsmen" as Hardy's best short work; though lacking the latter's novelistic sweep, it is more tightly written and thus a better success in pure short story terms. Anyone interested in Hardy should read it, but the fact that it is in so many collections - e.g., The Withered Arm and Other Stories - makes it hard to justify a standalone, especially as some collections cost little or no more than this.
This may even be Hardy's most superbly plotted and masterfully executed tale of all; the mysterious and foreboding threads coalesce in a dark, seemingly inevitable ending exemplifying Hardy's cruel fate twists. It does not take on grand concerns to the extent most of his best work does but is in many ways one of his bleakest stories; its vision of humanity headed toward a tragic end with little or no control over events is unforgettable. Hardy's best novels are replete with such drama, but no prior short story conveyed it so fully or well. "The Withered" is also an appropriate close for the book, being in many ways the culmination of Hardy's fiction to that point. It is one of his few works to have central scenes in both Casterbridge - the largest town in Wessex - and the surrounding countryside, while the cast of milkmaids, hanging judges, wronged women, and nervous new wives seems to have stepped out of a myriad Hardy stories. Not least interestingly, though much of Hardy's work is steeped in rural Southwest England folklore, this is virtually his only fiction with a strong supernatural element. His editor and friend Leslie Stephen criticized the element's ambiguity, saying he was unsure whether to believe or not, but this was surely Hardy's point; he again lets us judge. Far more important in any case are the dark forces at the story's heart - forces that soon dominated the little fiction he had left to write. Buying this in a collection gives one the chance to see it in other works along with this excellent one.
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