The three settings of Thomas Hardy poems [Satires of Circumstance] were composed in 1990 to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the writer's birth.
 
In the first, the young wife is blissfully unaware that the woman invited to tea and sitting next to her was her own husband's first choice, "till the fates ordained it could not be so".

'By Her Aunt's Grave', the niece and her lover decide to spend the "sixpence a week" saved over "eighty weeks, or near" ("to cover the cost of her headstone"), at the "dance tonight at the Load of Hay"....

'The Ruined Maid' is anything but ruined, of course.... In this chance meeting in town, a maid wonders at Melia's new-found chic, to which the refrains all say, in different ways, how "some polish is gained with one's ruin".

These recordings were made on 26th June 1996 by Christine Page, accompanied by Duncan Honeybourne, in the old Weymouth College Science Lecture Theatre which the Music Section regularly used for concerts and rehearsals. Rod Adams was the recording engineer, with help from Mike Botterill.