Author
Thomas Hardy
1840-1928
English novelist and poet, many of whose novels are set in his semi-fictional Wessex and follow characters struggling against their passions and social circumstances.
Thomas Hardy was born on 2 June 1840 at Higher Bockhampton, a hamlet east of Dorchester in Dorset, where his father worked as a stonemason and local builder. His mother, Jemima, was well read and taught him herself until he started school at eight. The family could not afford a university education, so at sixteen he was apprenticed to a local architect.
In 1862 he moved to London and joined the practice of the architect Arthur Blomfield, but he never felt at home there. After five years he returned to Dorset and decided to devote himself to writing. While restoring a church at St Juliot in Cornwall in 1870 he met Emma Gifford, whom he married in 1874. From 1885 they lived at Max Gate, a house outside Dorchester that Hardy designed and his brother built.
Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) first gave his region the name Wessex, and its success let him give up architecture. The Return of the Native (1878) and The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886) followed. Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891) was criticised for its sympathetic portrayal of a 'fallen woman', and Jude the Obscure (1895), the last novel he wrote, met an even stronger negative response for its treatment of sex, religion and marriage. In the twentieth century he published only poetry, which he had written throughout his life.
He died at Max Gate on 11 January 1928. Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd were both in the top 50 of the BBC's Big Read survey of best-loved novels.
Sources: wikipedia.org
