Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 in the county of Dorset. His
father was a stonemason and his mother educated him until age eight. His family
was too poor to pay for university, so he became an architect's apprentice
until he decided to focus on writing. His stories are generally set in the
Dorset area. In 1874 he married Emma Gifford, and her death in 1912 had a
profound effect on him. In 1914 he married his secretary, Florence Dugdale. His
first few novels were unsuccessful, and even his later works were controversial
and often censored. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Jude the
Obscure drew strong disapproval for their sexual frankness and social criticism
that Hardy stopped writing fiction, focusing instead on his poetry. He is best
known for Far
from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the
Obscure. He died in 1928, at the age of eighty-seven.
Virginia Woolf
noted some of Thomas Hardy’s enduring power as a writer: “Thus it is no
mere transcript of life at a certain time and place that Hardy has given us. It
is a vision of the world and of man’s lot as they revealed themselves to a
powerful imagination, a profound and poetic genius, a gentle and humane soul.”
