Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was a Victorian British novelist whose Far from the Madding Crowd, Tess of the d'Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure portrayed rural Wessex with tragic power and a structural critique of Victorian sexual and social convention.

Thomas Hardy spent the first half of his literary career writing novels — fourteen in total — and the second half writing poetry, to which he returned after the hostile critical reception of Jude the Obscure convinced him that prose fiction was no longer worth the effort. His major novels are set in a fictionalized rural England (Dorset and surrounding counties, renamed Wessex) that he depicts with loving specificity, even as his plots expose it as a system of brutal constraints on individual aspiration.

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), his fourth novel, was the first to generate serious critical attention and established the Wessex landscape as more than backdrop. Bathsheba Everdene — a landowner in her own right, fiercely independent, courted by three men of entirely different kinds — is his first great female protagonist. Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891), which Hardy subtitled “A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented,” is a novel explicitly about the sexual double standard: a woman who is raped and bears an illegitimate child is judged impure while the man responsible suffers no consequences. Victorian reviewers were largely scandalized.

Jude the Obscure (1895) went further — attacking marriage, religious hypocrisy, and the class barriers preventing talented working-class people from accessing education — and the backlash drove Hardy permanently from fiction. He spent the final thirty-two years of his life writing poetry, producing seven collections of considerable quality. His poetry has a loyal following among those who find his novels too relentlessly bleak; Far from the Madding Crowd remains the most accessible entry point to his fiction.