Essays on Thomas Hardy

2 June 1840, Stinsford, Dorset, England

11 January 1928, Dorchester, Dorset, England

Novelist, poet, and short story writer

Naturalism, Victorian literature

• Tess of the d'Urbervilles
• Far from the Madding Crowd
• The Mayor of Casterbridge

2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928

Thomas Hardy was an English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the counties of southwestern England.

Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Far from the Madding Crowd, The Mayor of Casterbridge, Jude the Obscure

Considered a Victorian realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited people's lives and caused unhappiness. Fate or chance is another important theme.

Hardy's legacy connects the masterful British writers like Wordsworth and Eliot to the era of Modernism that culminated in the likes of Woolf and that other, more poetic Eliot. Hardy’s most significant work spans some five decades, comprising novels and poetry that today are regarded as classics of the canon.

“Though a good deal is too strange to be believed, nothing is too strange to have happened.”
“A strong woman who recklessly throws away her strength, she is worse than a weak woman who has never had any strength to throw away.”
“Beauty lay not in the thing, but in what the thing symbolized.”