Thomas Hardy (Higher Bockhampton, 2 June 1840 – Paris, 11 January 1928) was an English naturalist novelist and poet from the Victorian era and the early 20th century. He is generally considered one of the great writers of the English literature.
Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton at Dorchester in the County of Dorset, the son of a stonemason, and followed from 1862 to 1867 trained as architect. After some years working as an architect, he decided to focus on writing. In his work he regularly draws from this background and experience. He began writing poetry, but went after his marriage over on prose in order to earn a living.
Between 1871 and 1895 he wrote thirteen novels. His first work, The Poor Man and the Lady, was refused by the publishers, which Hardy destroyed the manuscript.However, he got the necessary advice and encouragement, among other things by George Meredith, and he decided to continue. Are two following works published anonymously. After three published novels he turned out to have found the right shape and tone and he obtained his breakthrough with Far from the Madding Crowd. He then became a celebrated author, who had conquered its place in the literary world. Hardy stopped with his prose work after Jude the Obscure (1895), because he for this work, as well as for Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), had received a lot of criticism on the apparent antihuwelijks-attitude and for that time as immoral seen content. Then Hardy himself on his great love, poetry, with which he garnered much success again.
After the death of his first wife Emma Gifford in 1912, after a marriage of 38 years, he married Florence Dugdale. Their home at Max Gate in Dorchester (by Hardy himself designed, but hopelessly impractical) became a place of pilgrimage for other writers, like Siegfried Sassoon and Thomas Edward Lawrence.
Hardy remained active until a few days before his death. His funeral, on 16 January in Westminster Abbey, was a controversial event. His family and friends had seen him rather buried in Stinsford, Sir Sydney Carlyle Cockerell, his executor, but insisted that he would be buried in the Poets ' Corner, the writers corner in Westminster Abbey. It was decided to compromise: his heart was buried in Stinsford and his ashes was buried in the Church.
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Hardy's Wessex[Edit][]
Hardy's stories are usually off in the fictional County of Wessex, named after the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex, which belonged to the heptarchie that preceded the creation of the Kingdom of England.
[1][2]Map of the ' Wessex ' by Thomas Hardy, complete with the fictional place names
Hardy's Wessex includes the current counties of Berkshire, Devon, Dorset, Hampshire, Somerset and Wiltshire. The name was first used in ' Far from the Madding Crowd ' and only in the following years, especially from ' The Mayor of Casterbridge ', developed the concept further and he described the Hardy as a kind of frame within which his stories take place. The fictional place names refer to existing cities, towns and villages in this area. In later adaptations of his stories has Hardy the original original place names that he initially used, replaced by the fictional. A striking element in his work is that it paints the cultural atmosphere in the rural Wessex in the period prior to and around the arrival of the railways and the industrial revolution, which would change the English countryside for good.
[3][4]Thomas Hardy-monument==Novels[Edit]==
- The Poor Man and the Lady (1868, unpublished)
- Desperate Remedies (1871)
- Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
- A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
- Far from the Madding Crowd (1874), made into a film by John Schlesinger in 1967, television film by Nicholas Renton in 1998
- The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
- The Return of The Native (1878)
- The Trumpet-Major (1880)
- A Laodicean (1881)
- Two on a Tower (1882)
- The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
- The Woodlanders (1887)
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891), made into a film by Roman Polanski 's Tess under the title
- The Well-Beloved (1892/1897)
- Jude the Obscure (1895), made into a film in 1996 entitled "Jude", directed by Michael Winterbottom
Stories[Edit][]
- Wessex Tales (1888)
- A Group of Noble Dames (1891)
- Life's Little Ironies (1894)
- A Changed Man and Other Tales (1913)
Poetry[Edit][]
From 1898-focused Hardy is on poetry and published bundles to 1928. He created the great verse-and-prose drama The Dynasts (1904-1908). It describes in 130 companies the Napoleonic wars from 1805 to 1815.The Act is, as in the novels, governed by fate. His technique has influenced many later poets.
Further poetry:
- Wessex Poems (1898)
- Poems of the Past and Present (1901)
- Time's Laughing Stocks (1910)
- Satires of Circumstance (1914)
- Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922)
- Human Shows (1925)