Hardy, Thomas 1840-1928
English novelist, poet and dramatist

Thomas Hardy was born in Upper Bockhampton, near Dorchester in Dorset, the son of a stonemason. As a boy he read a lot, learned to play the fiddle and developed a love of nature. He was educated in Dorchester and at the age of 16 was apprenticed to a local architect. In 1862 he went to London, where he spent five years working as an assistant architect, returning home in 1867 to pursue his chosen profession. However, he had already begun his first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, which was never published.

There is speculation that around this time he met and fell in love with Tryphena Sparks, to whom he was related. The nature of their relationship is unclear but in 1870 he was sent to St Juliot, Cornwall, where he met Emma Gifford, whom he married in 1874, after the success of his novel Far From the Madding Crowd (1874). This was his fourth published novel in as many years: Desperate Remedies (1871), Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) and A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873) had been less successful. His marriage to Emma was not without difficulties but, ironically, when she died in 1912, Hardy was inspired to write some of the most moving love poems in the language ('Poems of 1912-13', in Satires of Circumstance, 1914).

A flood of novels continued to appear until 1895, with vibrant, brooding descriptive passages providing the backdrop to potent tragi-comedies. Among the most durable are The Return of the Native (1878), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891). Alhough Hardy was held in high esteem, critics carped at his seemingly inbred pessimism, and both Tess and Jude the Obscure (1895) were attacked virulently.

Thereafter, Hardy turned his attention to poetry, which he had always regarded as superior to fiction, and produced several volumes of lyrics, many of which express his love of rural life. His first collection, Wessex Poems, appeared in 1898; his last, Winter Words, posthumously in 1928, the year of his death. The Dynasts, a gargantuan drama in blank verse, occupied him for many years and was published in three instalments (1904, 1906, 1908). After Emma's death he married Florence Dugdale (1879-1937) and lived in Dorset, and was much visited there by aficionados and the literati. A biography published initially in two parts in 1928 and 1930 is thought to have been largely dictated by Hardy to Florence although it appeared under her name.

Bibliography: M Seymour-Smith, Hardy (1994); R Little Purdy and M Millgate (eds), The Collected Letters of Thomas Hardy (7 vols, 1978-88); E Hardy, Thomas Hardy, a critical biography (1954).