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Thomas Masterson Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 
1928) was a novelist and poet, generally regarded 
as one of the greatest figures in English literature.

Biography
Thomas Hardy was born at Upper Bockhampton near 
Dorchester in Dorset. His father was a stonemason. 
His mother was ambitious and well-read and supplemented 
his formal education. Hardy trained as an architect 
in Dorchester before moving to London to take up 
employment. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of 
British Architects and the Architectural Association.

His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was finished 
in 1867 but failed to find a publisher. Desperate 
Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) 
were published anonymously. In 1873, A Pair of Blue 
Eyes was published under his own name. The story 
draws on Hardy's courtship of Emma Gifford whom he 
married in 1874. His next novel, Far from the Madding 
Crowd (1874) was successful enough for Hardy to be 
able to give up his architectural work and take up 
a full-time literary career.

Over the next 25 years, Hardy produced 10 more 
novels. The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil, and 
then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The 
Return of the Native (1878). In 1885, they returned 
to Dorchester, moving into Max Gate, a house which 
Hardy had designed himself.

In 1898, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, 
Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over 
the previous 30 years. Hardy continued to publish 
collections until his death in 1928.

Although Hardy had been estranged from his wife for 
some years, her sudden death in 1912 had a traumatic 
effect on him. He made a trip to Cornwall to revisit 
places linked with her and their courtship and wrote 
a series, Poems 1912-13, exploring his grief.

In 1914 he married Florence Dugdale, 40 years his 
junior, whom he had first met in 1905. The writer 
Robert Graves, in his autobiography Goodbye to All 
That recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 
1920s. Hardy received Graves and his newly married 
wife very warmly and was encouraging about the younger 
author's work. The incident reveals a warmth of 
personality that belies the gloomy aspect of many 
of his novels.

Hardy fell ill in December 1927 and died in January 
1928, dictating his final poem to his wife on his 
deathbed. His funeral, on 16 January at Westminster 
Abbey, was a controversial occasion: his family and 
friends had wished him to be buried at Stinsford, but 
his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, had 
insisted he should be placed in Poets' Corner. A 
compromise was reached, whereby his heart was buried 
at Stinsford and his ashes were interred in the abbey.

Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and Max Gate in 
Dorchester are owned by the National Trust.


Hardy's Novels
Wikisource has original works written by or about: 
Thomas HardyHardy himself divided his novels into 
three classes.


Novels of Character and Environment
Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) 
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) 
The Return of the Native (1878) 
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) 
The Woodlanders (1887) 
Wessex Tales (1888) 
Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) 
Life's Little Ironies (1894) 
Jude the Obscure (1895) 

Romances and Fantasies
A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) 
The Trumpet-Major (1880) 
Two on a Tower (1882) 
A Group of Noble Dames (1891) 
The Well-Beloved (1897) (first published as a 
serial from 1892). 
[edit]
Novels of Ingenuity
Desperate Remedies (1871) 
The Hand of Ethelberta (1876) 
A Laodicean (1881) 
In addition there are a number of minor tales 
and novels including, the unpublished The Poor 
Man and the Lady written in 1867 and Alicia's 
Diary (1887).

Hardy's novels, stories and many of the poems 
take place in the "partly-real, partly-dream" 
county of Wessex (named after the Anglo-Saxon 
kingdom which existed in the area). The landscape 
was modelled on the real counties of Berkshire,
Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire, 
with fictional places based on real locations. 
One of his distinctive achievements is to have 
captured the cultural atmosphere of rural Wessex 
in the golden epoch that existed just before 
the impact of the railways and the industrial 
revolution was to change the English countryside 
for ever.

His works are often deeply pessimistic and full 
of bitter irony, in sharp contrast to the 
prevalent Victorian optimism. His writing is 
sometimes rough and even inelegant but at its 
best is capable of immense power.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) attracted 
criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a 
'fallen woman' and was initially refused 
publication. Its subtitle, A Pure Woman, was 
intended to raise the eyebrows of the Victorian 
middle-classes and did so. His next major novel, 
Jude the Obscure (1895) caused an uproar. It was 
heavily criticized for its apparent attack on the 
institution of marriage. The book caused further 
strain on Hardy's already difficult marriage due 
to Emma's concern that it would be read as 
autobiographical. Some booksellers sold the novel 
in brown paper bags and the Bishop of Wakefield 
is reputed to have burnt a copy. Disgusted with 
the public reception of two of his greatest works, 
Hardy gave up writing novels altogether.


Hardy's Poetry
Wessex Poems (1898) 
Poems of the Past and Present (1901) 
The Dynasts (1904) 
The Dynasts, Part 2 (1906) 
The Dynasts, Part 3 (1908) 
Satires of Circumstance (1914) 
Collected Poems (1919) 
Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) 
Human Shows (1925) 
His poetry was not as well received by his contemporaries 
as his novels had been, but critical response to Hardy's 
poetry has warmed considerably in recent years, in part 
because of the influence of Philip Larkin. His poems 
largely inhabit the same semi-fictional Wessex of the 
novels, and deal with themes of disappointment in love 
and life, and humankind's long struggle against the 
forces that control the world and which are indifferent 
to human suffering.

His poems range in style from the epic Dynasts to 
smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful, poems 
of the moment. Here for example is The Darkling 
Thrush dated 31 December 1900.

I leant upon a coppice gate 
  When Frost was spectre-grey, 
And Winter's dregs made desolate 
  The weakening eye of day. 
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky 
  Like strings of broken lyres, 
And all mankind that haunted nigh 
  Had sought their household fires. 
The land's sharp features seemed to be 
  The Century's corpse outleant, 
His crypt the cloudy canopy, 
  The wind his death-lament. 
The ancient pulse of germ and birth 
  Was shrunken hard and dry, 
And every spirit upon earth 
  Seemed fervourless as I. 
At once a voice arose among 
  The bleak twigs overhead 
In a full-hearted evensong 
  Of joy illimited; 
And agèd thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, 
  In blast-beruffled plume, 
Had chosen thus to fling his soul 
  Upon the growing gloom. 
So little cause for carolings 
  Of such ecstatic sound 
Was written on terrestrial things 
  Afar or nigh around, 
That I could think there trembled through 
  His happy good-night air 
Some blessèd Hope, whereof he knew 
  And I was unaware. 
  
This has many elements that are typical of Hardy's 
work. The strong first person voice, telling the 
story that the poem is centered around; an incident 
in nature triggering deep reflections in the 
observer (compare Hardy's poem about the lunar 
eclipse); the rural or bucolic setting; the 
desolate landscape; the struggle of small forces 
pitted against inimical nature; the faint but real 
possibility of redemption and hope at last.

Note also the formal rhythm and rhyme, and the high 
poetic tone, coupled with delightfully simple 
phrases such as "happy good-night air".