Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in 1840 in a thatched cottage in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, the son of a stonemason and a well-read mother who taught him to read before he was four. He was apprenticed at sixteen to a local architect specializing in church restoration, a profession he practiced for nearly two decades before his novels could support him. The architectural eye stayed with him: his fiction is unusually precise about buildings, landscapes, the angle of light on a hill. He married Emma Gifford in 1874, an unhappy union that became one of the great subjects of his later poetry, particularly the Poems of 1912–13 he wrote after her death.

He invented the half-fictional county of Wessex — a reimagining of the southwest of England, with Dorchester as its capital "Casterbridge" — and set the major novels there. Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was the first popular success: the story of Bathsheba Everdene, an independent farmer, and the three men who want her — the steady shepherd Gabriel Oak, the reckless soldier Sergeant Troy, and the obsessive farmer Boldwood. The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), and The Woodlanders (1887) followed, each working the same Wessex country at a different angle.

The two late novels were the ones that defined and then ended his career as a novelist. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) tells the story of a poor country girl raped by a richer relative, who tries to build a life afterward and is destroyed by the moral hypocrisy of the men around her and the indifference of a universe Hardy was no longer willing to pretend was benevolent. The subtitle — "A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented" — was a provocation in 1891, and reviewers attacked the book accordingly. Jude the Obscure (1895) went further: a working-class man's failed attempts to enter Oxford, an unmarried partnership with his cousin Sue Bridehead, and a final catastrophe so bleak that one bishop reportedly burned the book. The hostile reception convinced Hardy to stop writing novels altogether.

He turned to poetry, which he had always considered his primary vocation, and spent the next three decades producing some of the most important verse in modern English. Wessex Poems (1898), the verse-drama The Dynasts (1904–08), and the elegies for Emma established him as a poet of fatalism, of geological time, of small lives crushed by indifferent forces. His prosody is deliberately rough, full of compound coinages and Wessex dialect, refusing the smoothness of the Victorian lyric.

He died in 1928 at Max Gate, the house he had designed for himself outside Dorchester. His executors made a peculiar compromise: his ashes were interred in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, but his heart was buried separately in the churchyard at Stinsford, beside Emma, in the Wessex he had spent his life writing about. The arrangement is grotesque and somehow entirely Hardyesque — a man split between national monument and parish soil, neither version quite complete.