Hardy, Thomas (novelist)

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.