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More than 5000 entries on the history, culture and life of Britain (published in 1993 by Macmillan, now out of print)
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Thomas Hardy
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(1840–1928)
Novelist and poet, associated more than any other with the English countryside and in particular with Dorset, the county in which he was born and lived. Trained as an architect, he first achieved popular success as an author in 1874 with *Far from the Madding Crowd. It was also the book which introduced Wessex, the fictional county in the West Country which provides the setting for many of his novels and poems, with Casterbridge (Dorchester) as its county town. The best known among the novels which followed are The Return of the Native (1878), The *Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), *Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1896).
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The subject matter and treatment of the last two were highly controversial, in particular Jude – a study of the clash between the flesh and the spirit, offering a morbid view of both sex and Christianity. The public response caused Hardy to devote himself exclusively to poetry for the last third of his life.
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In 1904–8 he published the three parts of The Dynasts, a poetic drama set in the Napoleonic Wars. He followed this with several volumes of lyric poems drawing on the same material as his novels – the forces of nature in his beloved Wessex. In 1885 he and his first wife Emma (d. 1912) moved into Max Gate, a house which he built near Dorchester and lived in for the rest of his life (he married again in 1914). The thatched cottage in which he was born in Higher Brockhampton is kept in his memory.
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