Authors: Thomas Hardy

The first of these books was published in 1871 when Hardy, nearly thirty-one years old, was still lacking in literary training and experience. His entire schooling had been confined to eight years between the ages of eight and sixteen. For five years, he had worked as an apprentice in the drafting office of a Dorchester architect, John Hicks. When Hardy was twenty-one, he went to London and found employment with Arthur Blomfield, a successful metropolitan architect, with whom he remained for five years. Gothic churches and old manor houses never succeeded in crowding books out of their central place in Hardy’s affections, however. During his years in London, he tried his hand at composing verse; when he discovered that editors showed no readiness to publish his poems, he turned at the age of twenty-seven to novel-writing.

Hardy titled his first attempt at fiction The Poor Man and the Lady. He sent the manuscript to the London publisher Alexander Macmillan, who replied encouragingly but found too many faults in the work to be willing to print it. Hardy thereupon tried a second publisher, Chapman and Hall, where his manuscript was placed in the hands of their reader, the novelist George Meredith. In a meeting with Hardy, Meredith advised him to suppress The Poor Man and the Lady because of its vehement social satire and to write another novel “with more plot.” Hardy took Meredith’s advice and wrote Desperate Remedies, which was published anonymously and at his own expense in 1871. This was the beginning of a quarter-century’s activity as one of the most successful and influential novelists that England has produced.

Like Desperate Remedies, Hardy’s next novel, Under the Greenwood Tree, was published anonymously. In 1872, he was invited to contribute a story for serialization in Tinsleys’ Magazine; this novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, was the first to carry his name. When Far from the Madding Crowd was serialized in Cornhill Magazine in 1874, the acclaim from critics and from the general public was sufficient to encourage Hardy to stop publishing anonymously, to give up all further practice as an architect, and, in September 1874, to marry.

In the twenty years that followed, Hardy turned out ten more full-length novels as well as many short stories and articles. When his fourteenth and last novel, Jude the Obscure, the story of a couple who live together without marriage, resulted in an outcry, Hardy shrank from any further attempt to find expression in fiction and returned to his first love, poetry. In 1898, he surprised the world by publishing Wessex Poems, and throughout the next thirty years he produced volume after volume of verse; by the time of his death, he had composed nearly one thousand poems. In addition to this achievement in metrical composition, Hardy wrote a gigantic dramatic epic on the Napoleonic wars, which he called The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars.

Hardy had met his wife, Emma L. Gifford, in 1870 in Cornwall, where he had gone to supervise the restoration of a dilapidated church (Hardy thereupon used the Cornish setting and the device of an architect surveying a church in A Pair of Blue Eyes). Ten years after marrying, Hardy built a house near Dorchester, and from 1885 on his address was “Max Gate.” He and his wife had no children. Emma Hardy died in 1912.

In 1914, Hardy married Florence Emily Dugdale, who had helped him with research on The Dynasts: A Drama of the Napoleonic Wars. Later, Florence Hardy was for a time credited with being the author of The Early Life of Hardy and The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, though they had been largely written by Hardy himself. When Hardy died in 1928, it was suggested that he be buried in the Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey. There were many, however, who believed that an author whose heart had always been in the Dorset region, with Wessex folk among Wessex scenes, ought not to have that heart taken away to alien soil. Hardy’s heart was accordingly buried in the grave of his first wife at Stinsford, and his ashes were deposited next to those of Charles Dickens in Westminster Abbey.

In the three decades immediately following Hardy’s death, critics came to agree that his literary output was of uneven quality. Some of his novels are excellent, others are mediocre, and many of his poems have seemed harsh and unmusical, even to ears attuned to the discordant. Yet a careful reading of Hardy’s best novels and poems shows the same gifted author at work in both genres. There is the same attentive eye for nature in all seasons and guises, the same tender, sympathetic heart, and the same sorrowing mind. It would, however, be a mistake to think that the novels were all written from a single, unchanging point of view. Hardy grew and developed, and his philosophy of life matured, and the novels reflect this. From the fragile charm of Under the Greenwood Tree to Far from the Madding Crowd and The Return of the Native, perhaps Hardy’s most “fatalistic” works, there is an immense advance. The Mayor of Casterbridge, too, in which Hardy quotes “Character is Fate,” marks a distinct shift in his viewpoint. The Woodlanders, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure are written by an older author with a riper social outlook and a clearer understanding of the causes of human behavior. Tess, executed for the murder of the man who had once raped her, and Jude, who dies after his beloved Sue returns to the husband she loathes, remain powerful examples of human suffering in an unforgiving world.