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Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) Biography - English Novelist and Poet
Thomas Masterson Hardy (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928) was a novelist and poet, generally regarded as one of the greatest figures in English literature.
Thomas Hardy was born at Upper Bockhampton near Dorchester in Dorset. His father was a stonemason. His mother was ambitious and well-read and supplemented his formal education. Hardy trained as an architect in Dorchester before moving to London to take up employment. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British Architects and the Architectural Association.
His first novel, The Poor Man and the Lady, was finished in 1867 but failed to find a publisher. Desperate Remedies (1871) and Under the Greenwood Tree (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873, A Pair of Blue Eyes was published under his own name. The story draws on Hardy's courtship of Emma Gifford whom he married in 1874. His next novel, Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) was successful enough for Hardy to be able to give up his architectural work and take up a full-time literary career.
Over the next 25 years, Hardy produced 10 more novels. The Hardys moved from London to Yeovil, and then to Sturminster Newton, where he wrote The Return of the Native (1878). In 1885, they returned to Dorchester, moving into Max Gate, a house which Hardy had designed himself.
In 1898, Hardy published his first volume of poetry, Wessex Poems, a collection of poems written over the previous 30 years. Hardy continued to publish collections until his death in 1928.
Although Hardy had been estranged from his wife for some years, her sudden death in 1912 had a traumatic effect on him. He made a trip to Cornwall to revisit places linked with her and their courtship and wrote a series, Poems 1912-13, exploring his grief.
In 1914 he married Florence Dugdale, 40 years his junior, whom he had first met in 1905. The writer Robert Graves, in his autobiography Goodbye to All That recalls meeting Hardy in Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received Graves and his newly married wife very warmly and was encouraging about the younger author's work. The incident reveals a warmth of personality that belies the gloomy aspect of many of his novels.
Hardy fell ill in December 1927 and died in January 1928, dictating his final poem to his wife on his deathbed. His funeral, on 16 January at Westminster Abbey, was a controversial occasion: his family and friends had wished him to be buried at Stinsford, but his executor, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, had insisted he should be placed in Poets' Corner. A compromise was reached, whereby his heart was buried at Stinsford and his ashes were interred in the abbey.
Hardy's cottage at Bockhampton and Max Gate in Dorchester are owned by the National Trust. |
