Thomas Hardy
1840–1928
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Thomas Hardy trained as an architect and brought an architect's sense of structure and fate to the novel. Setting his fiction in the half-real county of Wessex — a renamed Dorset and its neighbors — he wrote about rural people crushed by a changing world: Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).
His last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was attacked as immoral for its bleak portrayal of marriage, class and a child's suicide. Stung by the hostility, Hardy abandoned novels entirely at the height of his fame and spent the remaining 33 years of his life writing poetry — becoming one of the most important English poets of the twentieth century.
After his death, his heart was buried in his native Stinsford churchyard while his ashes were interred in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey — a split burial as divided as his fiction's characters.
Frequently asked
Why did Thomas Hardy stop writing novels?
His last novel, Jude the Obscure (1895), was attacked as immoral for its bleak portrayal of marriage, class and a child's suicide. Stung by the hostility, Hardy abandoned novels at the height of his fame and spent his remaining 33 years writing poetry.
What is Wessex in Hardy's novels?
Wessex is Hardy's half-real fictional county — a renamed Dorset and its neighboring counties — where he set novels including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) and Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891).
Where is Thomas Hardy buried?
In a famously divided burial: his heart was interred in the churchyard of his native Stinsford, Dorset, while his ashes were placed in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey.
Why it matters today
Hardy's fatalism — character as destiny, society as trap — runs through modern naturalist fiction and film, and his late turn made him the bridge between Victorian verse and twentieth-century English poetry.
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