Thomas Hardy Biography and List of Works

English poet and regional novelist whose works depict the imaginary county "Wessex" (=Dorset). Hardy's writing career spanned over fifty years. His earliest books appeared when Anthony Trollope (1815-82) wrote his Palliser series, and he published poetry in the decade of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land. Hardy's work reflected his stoical pessimism and sense of tragedy in human life.

"Critics can never be made to understand that that the failure may be greater than the success... To have the strength to roll a stone weighting a hundredweight to the top of a mountain is a success, and to have the strength to roll a stone of then hundredweight only halfway up that mount is a failure. But the latter is two or three times as strong a deed."
(Hardy in his diary, 1907)

Hardy's own life wasn't similar to his stories. He was born on the Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester. His father was a master mason and building contractor, his mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his early education. After schooling in Dorchester, Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. He worked in an office, which specialized in restoration of churches. In 1874 Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, for whom he wrote 40 years later, after her death, a group of poems known as VETERIS VESTIGIAE FLAMMAE (Vestiges of an Old Flame)

At the age of 22, Hardy moved to London and started to write poems, which idealized rural life. He worked as an assistant in the architectural firm of Arthur Blomfield, visited art galleries, attended evening classes in French at King's College, enjoyed Shakespeare and opera, and read the works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mills, whose positivism influenced him deeply. In 1867 Hardy left London for the family home in Dorset, and resumed work briefly with Hicks in Dorchester. He entered into a temporary engagement with Tryphena Sparks, a sixteen-year-old relative. Hardy continued his architectural work, but encouraged by Emma Lavinia Gifford, he started to consider literature as his "true vocation".

Unable to find a public for his poetry, the novelist George Meredith advised Hardy to write a novel. His first novel was written in 1867, but the book was rejected and he destroyed the manuscript. His first book that gained notice, was FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD (1874). After its success Hardy was convinced that he could earn his living as an author. He devoted himself entirely to writing and produced a series of novels, among them THE RETURN OF NATIVE (1878), THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE (1886).

TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES (1891) came into conflict with Victorian morality. It explored the dark side of his family connections in Berkshire. In the story the poor villager girl Tess Durbeyfield is seduced by the wealthy Alec D'Uberville. She becomes pregnant but the child dies in infancy. Tess finds work as a dairymaid on a farm and falls in love with Angel Clare, a clergyman's son. They marry but when Tess tells Angel about her past, he hypocritically deserts her. Tess becomes Alec's mistress. Angel returns from Brazil, repenting his harshness, but finds her living with Alec. Tess kills Alec in desperation. She is arrested and hanged.

Hardy's JUDE THE OBSCURE (1895) aroused even more debate. The story dramatized the conflict between carnal and spiritual life, tracing Jude Fawley's life from his boyhood to his early death. Jude marries Arabella, but abandons her. He falls in love with his cousin, hypersensitive Sue Bridehead, who marries the decaying schoolmaster, Phillotson, in a masochist fit. Jude and Sue obtain divorces, but their life together deteriorates under the pressure of poverty and social disapproval. The eldest son of Jude and Arabella, a grotesque boy nicknamed 'Father Time', kills their children and himself. Broken by the loss, Sue goes back to Phillotson, and Jude returns to Arabella. Soon after Jude dies, and his last words are: "Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter in soul?".

In 1896, disturbed by the public uproar over the unconventional subjects of two of his greatest novels, Tess of the D'Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy announced that he would never write fiction again. A bishop solemnly burnt the book, 'probably in his despair at not being able to burn me', Hardy noted. Hardy's marriage had also suffered from the public outrage - critics on both sides of the Atlantic abused the author as degenerate and called the work itself disgusting. In April 1912, Hardy wrote:

"Then somebody discovered that Jude was a moral work - austere in its treatment of a difficult subject - as if the writer had not all the time said in the Preface that it was meant to be so. Thereupon many uncursed me, and the matter ended, the only effect of it on human conduct that I could discover being its effect on myself - the experience completely curing me of the further interest in novel-writing."

By 1885 the Hardys had settled near Dorchester at Max gate, a house designed by the author and built by his brother, Henry. With the exceptions of seasonal stays in London and occasional excursions abroad, this was Hardy's home for the rest of his life.

During the remainder of his life, Hardy wrote several collections of poems. His drama of the Napoleonic War, THE DYNASTS, composed between 1903 and 1908, was mostly in blank verse. Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors in 1909. King George V conferred on him the Order of Merit and he received in 1912 the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature. Emma Hardy died in 1912 and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale. From 1920 through 1927 Hardy worked on his autobiography, which was disguised as the work of Florence Hardy. It appeared in two volumes (1928 and 1930). Hardy's last book published in his lifetime was HUMAN SHOWS, FAR PHANTASIES, SONGS AND TRIFLES (1925). He died in Dorchester, Dorset, on January 11, 1928. His body was cremated in Dorchester and his ashes buried with an impressive ceremony in Westminster Abbey. According to a literary anecdote his heart was to be buried in Stinsford, his birthplace, and all went according to plan until a cat belonging to the poet's sister snatched the heart off the kitchen where it was temporarily kept and disappeared into the woods with it. Hardy's WINTER WORDS IN VARIOUS MOODS AND METRES appeared posthumously in 1928.

For further reading: The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by P.D.L. Turner (1998); Thomas Hardy in Our Time by R.W. Langbaum (1995); Hardy and the Erotic by T.R. Wright (1989); Thomas Hardy by M. Millgate (1982); The Older Hardy by R. Gittings (1980); An Essay on Thomas Hardy by J. Bayley (1978); The Final Years of Thomas Hardy, 1912-1928 by H. Orel (1976); Young Thomas Hardy by R. Gittings (1975); Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by J.I.M. Stewart (1971); The Poetry of Thomas Hardy: A Handbook and Commentary by J.O. Bailey (1970); Thomas Hardy by I.Howe (1967); Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography by E. Hardy (1954); Thomas Hardy by A.J. Guerard (1949); Hardy of Wessex: His Life and Career by C.J. Weber (1940) - See also: Wladyslaw Reymont, C.D.Lewis (The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy, 1953), Michael Innes, Francois La Rochefoucauld - "Hardy had an observing eye, a remembering mind; he did not need the Greeks to teach him that the Furies do arrive punctually, and that neither act, not will, nor intention will serve to deflect a man's destiny from him, once he has taken the step which decides it." Catherine Anne Porter in Notes on a Criticism (1940)

DESPERATE REMEDIES, (1871)