Hardy, Thomas (1840-1928)

English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy. His tragic tales, set in the fictional county of ‘Wessex’, received a hostile reception from the public. Attacked for his attitudes to marriage and religion, he abandoned fiction to concentrate on his poetry. He published eight volumes, including a series of elegies to his first wife Emma Gifford.

English novelist and poet. His novels, set in rural ‘Wessex’ (his native West Country), portray intense human relationships played out in a harshly indifferent natural world. They include Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), and Jude the Obscure (1895). His poetry includes the Wessex Poems (1898), the blank-verse epic of the Napoleonic Wars The Dynasts (1903-08), and several volumes of lyrics. Many of his books have been successfully dramatized for film and television.

Hardy was born in Dorset and trained as an architect. His first success was Far From the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles, subtitled ‘A Pure Woman’, outraged public opinion by portraying as its heroine an unmarried woman who had a child. Jude the Obscure received an even more hostile reception, which reinforced Hardy's decision to confine himself to verse in his later years. In his novels Hardy dramatizes with uncompromising directness a belief in the futility of fighting against the cruelties of circumstance, the inevitability of each individual's destiny, and the passing of all beauty. His poems, many of which are now rated as highly as the best of his prose fiction, often contain a compressed version of the same theme, either by seeing ahead from a happy present to a grim future or else looking back from the bitterness of the present to a past that was full of promise.

His first completed novel, Desperate Remedies (1871), was a murder story published at his own expense. It was followed by Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), A Pair of Blue Eyes (1872-73), and his first successful work, Far From the Madding Crowd. The Return of the Native marks a major step forward in Hardy's development, being a highly charged novel in which the vast brooding expanse of Egdon Heath is said to be the real hero. The Trumpet Major (1880) and A Laodicean (1881) are unremarkable, but The Mayor of Casterbridge is shaped round a penetrating study of the character of Michael Henchard. The Woodlanders gives a sensitive picture of the rhythmic life of a tree-cutting, fence-making community. This was followed by Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, a grim study of the downward path of an intelligent and sensitive young man, ending in a tragedy that spreads far beyond Jude himself.

His first published volume of verse, Wessex Poems, contains much early work. The rest of his poetry is contained in six volumes: Poems of the Past and Present (1901), Time's Laughing Stocks (1909), Satires of Circumstance (1914), Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922), Human Shows (1925), and Winter Words (1928). Altogether he wrote nearly 1,000 poems.

Hardy also wrote four volumes of short stories: Wessex Tales (1888), A Group of Noble Dames (1891), Life's Little Ironies (1894), and A Changed Man (1913). In The Dynasts war, national power, and political figures of Napoleonic times are represented as seen from above by supernatural spectators who act as a commenting chorus. His only other dramatic piece, about the legend of Tristan and Isolde, is The Tragedy of the Queen of Cornwall (1923).