Thomas Hardy

Thomas Hardy was born in the English countryside in 1840, the son of a builder. His family did not have enough money for him to attend university and so he trained to become an architect, but left London, where he was studying, as he hated cities and felt that living there was damaging his health. Before he returned to his beloved countryside and took up writing full-time, he married. Although he and his wife separated later in life, her death in 1912 greatly saddened him. In fact, his second marriage to a much younger woman was only a shadow of his first. When Hardy died at the grand old age of 87, he was one of the most highly regarded novelists in the English-speaking world. While he was alive though, his works were seen as obscene and, after angry comments in the newspapers about his last novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’, he never published another. In fact, he had always seen himself more as a poet. Although his poetry is still read today, it is his novels of rural decay that are most popular. They include: ‘The Return of the Native’, ‘The Mayor of Casterbridge’ and ‘Tess of the d’Urbevilles’.