Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) was an English novelist and poet. Much of his literary work concerns the struggle of human beings against the unsympathetic force that inflicts the many sufferings and ironies of life.
Many of Hardy’s famous works are set in a semi-fictional ‘Wessex,’ which is based on his native Dorset. Hardy’s achievement teems with rich textures of local customs and regional folklore.
Born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, Hardy became an apprentice to an architect and spent his early twenties in London, where he began to write his first poems. He returned to Dorset and supplemented his architectural wages by writing novels, which were soon popular enough for him to take up writing full-time.
His first significant success was Far from the Madding Crowd (1874.) His subsequent tragic tales remain among the most widely read 19th-century novels and include The Return of the Native (1878,) The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886,) Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891,) and Jude the Obscure (1895.) Critics attacked the latter for its immoral tone, and, after that, Hardy devoted himself to poetry, including Wessex Poems (1898) and The Dynasts (1903–08.)
Hardy’s prolific output as a novelist often overshadows his consequent career as a poet. However, his intensely musical and movingly mournful poems, mostly written after the death of his first wife, expose unparalleled levels of emotional truth, helping his writing form a bridge between Victorianism and modernism in both fiction and poetry.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Thomas Hardy
Some folk want their luck buttered.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Luck
Pessimism is, in brief, playing the sure game. You cannot lose at it; you may gain. It is the only view of life in which you can never be disappointed. Having reckoned what to do in the worst possible circumstances, when better arise, as they may, life becomes child’s play.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Pessimism
Everybody is so talented nowadays that the only people I care to honor as deserving real distinction are those who remain in obscurity.
—Thomas Hardy
Once victim, always victim — that’s the law.
—Thomas Hardy
Of course poets have morals and manners of their own, and custom is no argument with them.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Custom
If all hearts were open and all desires known — as they would be if people showed their souls — how many gapings, sighings, clenched fists, knotted brows, broad grins, and red eyes should we see in the market-place!
—Thomas Hardy
Persons with weight of character carry, like planets, their atmospheres along with them in their orbits.
—Thomas Hardy
Topics: Integrity
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