Wessex novelist who insisted he was mainly a poet
Thomas Hardy (1840–1928), Victorian realist after George Eliot and touched by Wordsworthian Romanticism, scorned much Victorian social hypocrisy. Famous for novels such as Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Mayor of Casterbridge, he published a first poetry collection only in 1898 though he wrote verse lifelong.
Tragic figures wrestle passion and circumstance across semi-fictional Wessex—Dorset and neighbouring counties expanded from an Anglo-Saxon kingdom name. Born 2 June 1840 in Higher Bockhampton near Dorchester to stonemason Thomas Hardy Sr.
University was out of reach, so his schooling ended at sixteen with an apprenticeship to the Dorchester architect James Hicks. In 1862 he moved to London, studied at King's College, won prizes from both the Architectural Association and the Royal Institute of British Architects, and assisted Arthur Blomfield. He never felt at home there, painfully aware of class, and read John Stuart Mill, Fourier and Comte before ill health sent him back to Dorset after five years to write.
His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was finished by 1867 but never published; George Meredith warned him it was too politically controversial. He then published two novels without his name on them: Desperate Remedies in 1871, then Under the Greenwood Tree a year later. While restoring the church of St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met Emma Gifford, whom he married in 1874, and in 1885 they moved into Max Gate in Dorchester, a house he designed and his brother built. The marriage cooled, yet Emma's death in 1912 devastated him and produced his Poems 1912–13; in 1914 he married his secretary Florence Dugdale, 39 years younger.
Appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910, he collected 25 Nobel nominations by 1927 and was a finalist in 1923 without winning. He campaigned to protect old buildings and joined the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings in its early years, and in 1914 joined 53 authors, among them Kipling and Conan Doyle, in signing a declaration backing Britain's war. He died at Max Gate on 11 January 1928 after pleurisy, dictating a last poem on his deathbed. His executors burned his letters and notebooks, though 12 notebooks survive, and D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf were among his admirers.
Source: Thomas Hardy
