Thomas Hardy’s own life wasn’t similar to his stories. He was born on the Egdon Heath, in Dorset, near Dorchester. His father was a master mason and building contractor. Hardy’s mother, whose tastes included Latin poets and French romances, provided for his education. After schooling in Dorchester Hardy was apprenticed to an architect. He worked in an office, which specialized in restoration of churches. In 1874 Hardy married Emma Lavinia Gifford, for whom he wrote 40 years later, after her death, a group of poems known as Veteris Vestigiae Flammae (Vestiges of an Old Flame).
At the age of 22 Hardy moved to London and started to write poems, which idealized the rural life. He was an assistant in the architectural firm of Arthur Blomfield, visited art galleries, attended evening classes in French at King’s College, enjoyed Shakespeare and opera, and read works of Charles Darwin, Herbert Spencer, and John Stuart Mills, whose positivism influenced him deeply. In 1867 Hardy left London for the family home in Dorset, and resumed work briefly with Hicks in Dorchester. He entered into a temporary engagement with Tryphena Sparks, a sixteen-year-old relative. Hardy continued his architectural work, but encouraged by Emma Lavinia Gifford, he started to consider literature as his “true vocation.”
Hardy did not first find public for his poetry. The novelist George Meredith advised Hardy to write a novel. The Poor Man And The Lady, written in 1867, was rejected by many publishers and Hardy destroyed the manuscript. His first book that gained notice was Far From The Madding Crowd (1874). After its success Hardy was convinced that he could earn his living by his pen. Devoting himself entirely to writing, Hardy produced a series of novels.
Tess Of The D’urbervilles (1891) came into conflict with Victorian morality. It explored the dark side of his family connections in Berkshire.
Hardy’s Jude The Obscure (1895) aroused even more debate. The story dramatized the conflict between carnal and spiritual life.
In 1896, disturbed by the public uproar over the unconventional subjects of two of his greatest novels, Tess of the D’Urbervilles and Jude the Obscure, Hardy announced that he would never write fiction again. A bishop solemnly burnt the book, ‘probably in his despair at not being able to burn me’, Hardy noted. Hardy’s marriage had also suffered from the public outrage—critics on both sides of the Atlantic abused the author as degenerate and called the work itself disgusting.
By 1885 the Hardys had settled near Dorchester. With the exceptions of seasonal stays in London and occasional excursions abroad, was his home for the rest of his life.
After giving up the novel, Hardy brought out a first group of Wessex poems, some of which had been composed 30 years before. During the remainder of his life, Hardy continued to publish several collections of poems. Hardy’s gigantic panorama of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts, composed between 1903 and 1908, was mostly in blank verse. Hardy succeeded on the death of his friend George Meredith to the presidency of the Society of Authors in 1909. King George V conferred on him the Order of Merit and he received in 1912 the gold medal of the Royal Society of Literature.
Hardy kept to his marriage with Emma Gifford although it was unhappy. Emma Hardy died in 1912 and in 1914 Hardy married his secretary, Florence Emily Dugdale, a woman in her 30’s, almost 40 years younger than he. From 1920 through 1927 Hardy worked on his autobiography, which was disguised as the work of Florence Hardy. It appeared in two volumes (1928 and 1930). Hardy’s last book was Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs And Trifles (1925). Winter Words In Various Moods And Metres appeared posthumously in 1928.
Hardy bravely challenged many of the sexual and religious conventions of the Victorian age. The centre of his novels was the rather desolate and history-freighted countryside around Dorchester. In the early 1860s, after the appearance Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), Hardy’s faith was still unshaken, but he soon adopted the mechanical-determinist view of nature’s cruelty, reflected in the inevitably tragic and self-destructive fates of his characters. In his poems Hardy depicted rural life without sentimentality—his mood was often stoically hopeless.
Hardy died on January 11, 1928. His ashes were cremated in Dorchester and buried with impressive ceremonies in the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey.
