The Wessex novelist

Thomas Hardy (1840– 1928), the son of a stone mason, first trained as an architect. Moving to London in 1862, he worked for Arthur Blomfield, a distinguished Victorian architect noted for his churches. Back in his native Dorset by 1867, Hardy’s first published novel was Desperate Remedies (1871), but only the success of Far From the Madding Crowd (1874), his fourth novel, enabled him to abandon architecture to concentrate on writing full time.

In 1878, he wrote The Return of the Native, another of his great Wessex novels. Others include The Mayor of Casterbridge (the titular town being based on Dorchester, in 1886), The Woodlanders (1887), Tess of the D’urbervilles (1891) and Jude the Obscure (1895), the latter pair causing uproar in their day for focusing on society’s hypocritical attitudes towards women. Hardy’s verse includes Wessex Poems (1898).