Thomas Hardy, OM (2 June 1840 – 11 January 1928)
was an English
novelist and poet of the
naturalist movement,
although in several poems he displays elements of the previous
romantic and enlightenment periods of literature, such as his
fascination with the supernatural.
While he regarded himself primarily as a
poet
who composed novels mainly for financial gain, during his lifetime,
he was much better known for his novels which earned him a
reputation as a great novelist. The bulk of his fictional works,
intially published as serials in magazines, were set mainly in the
semi-fictional land of
Wessex
(based on the Dorchester region where he grew up) and explored
tragic characters struggling against their passions and social
circumstances.
Hardy's poetry, first published in his 50s, has come to be as
well-regarded as his novels and has had a significant influence
over modern English poetry, especially after
The Movement poets of the 1950s
and 1960s cited Hardy as a major figure.
Biography
Thomas
Hardy was born at Higher Bockhampton, a
hamlet in the parish of Stinsford
to the east of Dorchester
in Dorset
, England
. His
father (Thomas) worked as a
stonemason
and local builder. His mother Jemima was well-read and educated
Thomas until he went to his first school at Bockhampton at age
eight. For several years he attended a school run by a Mr Last.
Here he learned Latin and demonstrated academic potential. However,
a family of Hardy's social position lacked the means for a
university education, and his formal education ended at the age of
16 when he became
apprenticed to John
Hicks, a local
architect.
Hardy trained as an
architect in Dorchester before moving to
London
in 1862; there he enrolled as a student at King's College,
London
. He won prizes from the Royal Institute of British
Architects and the Architectural Association
. Hardy never felt at home in London. He was
acutely conscious of class divisions and his social inferiority.
However, he was interested in social reform and was familiar with
the works of
John Stuart Mill. He
was also introduced to the works of Charles Fourier and
Auguste Comte during this period by his Dorset
friend Horace Moule.
Five years later, concerned about his health,
he returned to Dorset
and decided
to dedicate himself to writing.
In 1870,
while on an architectural mission to restore the parish church of
St
Juliot
in Cornwall
, Hardy met
and fell in love with Emma Lavinia
Gifford, whom he married in 1874. Although he later
became estranged from his wife, who died in 1912, her death had a
traumatic effect on him.
After her death, Hardy made a trip to
Cornwall
to revisit
places linked with their courtship, and his Poems 1912–13 reflect upon her
passing. In 1914, Hardy married his secretary
Florence Emily Dugdale, who was 39 years
his junior. However, he remained preoccupied with his first wife's
death and tried to overcome his remorse by writing poetry.
Hardy became ill with
pleurisy in December
1927 and died in January 1928, having dictated his final poem to
his wife on his deathbed.
His funeral was on 16 January at Westminster
Abbey
, and it proved a controversial occasion because
Hardy and his family and friends had wished for his body to be
interred at Stinsford
in the same grave as his first wife, Emma.
However,
his executor, Sir Sydney
Carlyle Cockerell, insisted that he be placed in the abbey's
famous Poets'
Corner
. A compromise was reached whereby his heart
was buried at Stinsford with Emma, and his ashes in Poets'
Corner.
Shortly after Hardy's death, the executors of his estate burnt his
letters and notebooks. Twelve records survived, one of them
containing notes and extracts of newspaper stories from the 1820s.
Research into these provided insight into how Hardy kept track of
them and how he used them in his later work. In the year of his
death Mrs Hardy published
The Early Life of Thomas Hardy,
1841–1891: compiled largely from contemporary notes, letters,
diaries, and biographical memoranda, as well as from oral
information in conversations extending over many years.
Hardy's work was admired by many authors including
D. H. Lawrence and
Virginia Woolf. In his autobiography
Goodbye to All That,
Robert Graves recalls meeting Hardy in
Dorset in the early 1920s. Hardy received him and his newly married
wife warmly, and was encouraging about his work.
In 1910, Hardy was awarded the
Order of Merit.
Hardy's
cottage at
Bockhampton
and Max
Gate
in Dorchester
are owned by the
National Trust.
Religious beliefs
Hardy's family were Anglican, but not especially devout. He was
baptised at the age of five weeks and attended church, where his
father and uncle contributed to music. However, he did not attend
the local Church of England school, instead being sent to Mr Last's
school, three miles away. As a young adult, he befriended
Henry R. Bastow (a
Plymouth Brethren man), who also worked as
a pupil architect, and who was preparing for adult baptism in the
Baptist Church, and Hardy flirted with conversion, but decided
against it. Bastow went to
Australia and
maintained a long correspondence with Hardy, but eventually Hardy
tired of these exchanges and the correspondence ceased. This
concluded Hardy's links with the Baptists.
Hardy’s idea of fate in life gave way to his philosophical struggle
with
God. Although Hardy’s faith remained
intact, the irony and struggles of life led him to question the
traditional
Christian view of God: Hardy's
religious life seems to have mixed
agnosticism,
deism, and
spiritism. Once, when asked in
correspondence by a clergyman about the question of reconciling the
horrors of pain with the goodness of a loving God, Hardy
replied,
Nevertheless, Hardy frequently conceived of and wrote about
supernatural forces that control the universe, more through
indifference or caprice than any firm will. Also, Hardy showed in
his writing some degree of fascination with ghosts and spirits.
Despite these sentiments, Hardy retained a strong emotional
attachment to the Christian liturgy and church rituals,
particularly as manifested in rural communities, that had been such
a formative influence in his early years, and Biblical references
can be found woven throughout many of Hardy's novels.
Hardy's friends during his apprenticeship to John Hicks included
Horace Moule (one of the sons of
Henry Moule) and the poet
William Barnes, both
ministers. Moule remained a close
friend of Hardy's for the rest of his life, and introduced him to
new scientific findings that cast doubt on literal interpretations
of the Bible, such as those of
Gideon
Mantell. Moule gave Hardy a copy of Mantell's book
The
Wonders of Geology (1848) in 1858, and Adelene Buckland has
suggested that there are "compelling similarities" between the
"cliffhanger" section from
A Pair of Blue Eyes and
Mantell's geological descriptions. It has also been suggested that
the character of Henry Knight in
A Pair of Blue Eyes was
based on Horace Moule.
Novels
Hardy's first
novel,
The Poor Man and the Lady,
finished by 1867, failed to find a publisher and Hardy destroyed
the manuscript so only parts of the novel remain. He was encouraged
to try again by his mentor and friend, Victorian poet and novelist
George Meredith.
Desperate Remedies (1871) and
Under the Greenwood
Tree (1872) were published anonymously. In 1873
A Pair of Blue Eyes, a
novel drawing on Hardy's courtship of his first wife, was published
under his own name. The term "
cliffhanger" is considered to have originated
with the serialized version of this story (which was published in
Tinsley's Magazine between
September 1872 and July 1873) in which Henry Knight, one of the
protagonists, is left literally hanging off a cliff.
Hardy said that he first introduced
Wessex in
Far from the Madding Crowd
(1874), his next novel. It was successful enough for Hardy to give
up architectural work and pursue a literary career. Over the next
twenty-five years Hardy produced ten 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 moved for a last time, to
Max
Gate
, a house outside Dorchester designed by Hardy and
built by his brother. There he wrote
The Mayor of Casterbridge
(1886),
The Woodlanders
(1887) and
Tess of the
d'Urbervilles (1891), the last of which attracted
criticism for its sympathetic portrayal of a "fallen woman" and was
initially refused publication. Its subtitle,
A Pure Woman:
Faithfully Presented, was intended to raise the eyebrows of
the
Victorian middle-classes.
Jude the Obscure,
published in 1895, met with even stronger negative outcries from
the
Victorian public for its frank
treatment of sex, and was often referred to as "Jude the Obscene".
Heavily criticised for its apparent attack on the institution of
marriage through the presentation of such concepts as
erotolepsy, the book caused further strain on
Hardy's already difficult marriage because Emma Hardy was concerned
that
Jude the Obscure would be read as autobiographical.
Some booksellers sold the novel in brown paper bags, and the
Bishop of Wakefield is reputed
to have burnt his copy. In his postscript of 1912, Hardy humorously
referred to this incident as part of the career of the book: "After
these [hostile] verdicts from the press its next misfortune was to
be burnt by a bishop — probably in his despair at not being able to
burn me".
Despite this criticism, Hardy had become a celebrity in
English literature by the 1900s, with
several highly successful novels behind him, yet he felt disgust at
the public reception of two of his greatest works and gave up
writing fiction altogether.
Literary themes
Although he wrote a great deal of poetry, most of it went
unpublished until after 1898, thus Hardy is best remembered for the
series of novels and short stories he wrote between 1871 and 1895.
His
novels are set in the imaginary world of Wessex
, a large
area of south and south-west England, using the name of the
Anglo-Saxon kingdom that covered
the area. Hardy was part of two worlds. He had a deep
emotional bond with the rural way of life which he had known as a
child, but he was also aware of the changes which were under way
and the current social problems, from the innovations in
agriculture — he captured the epoch just before the
Industrial Revolution changed the
English countryside — to the unfairness and hypocrisy of Victorian
sexual behaviour.
Hardy critiques certain social constraints that hindered the lives
of those living in the 19th century. Considered a Victorian Realist
writer, Hardy examines the social constraints that are part of the
Victorian status quo, suggesting these rules hinder the lives of
all involved and ultimately lead to unhappiness. In
Two on a
Tower, Hardy seeks to take a stand against these rules and
sets up a story against the backdrop of social structure by
creating a story of love that crosses the boundaries of class. The
reader is forced to consider disposing of the conventions set up
for love. Nineteenth-century society enforces these conventions,
and societal pressure ensures conformity. Swithin St Cleeve's
idealism pits him against contemporary social constraints. He is a
self-willed individual set up against the coercive strictures of
social rules and mores.
Hardy’s stories take into consideration the events of life and
their effects. Fate plays a significant role as the thematic basis
for many of his novels. Characters are constantly encountering
crossroads, which are symbolic of a point of opportunity and
transition.
Far From the
Madding Crowd tells a tale of lives that are constructed
by chance. “Had Bathsheba not sent the valentine, had Fanny not
missed her wedding, for example, the story would have taken an
entirely different path.” Once things have been put into motion,
they will play out. Hardy's characters are in the grips of an
overwhelming fate.
Hardy paints a vivid picture of rural life in the 19th century,
with all its joys and suffering, as a fatalistic world full of
superstition and injustice. His heroes and heroines are often
alienated from society and are rarely readmitted. He tends to
emphasise the impersonal and, generally, negative powers of fate
over the mainly
working class people
he represents in his novels. Hardy exhibits in his books elemental
passion, deep instinct, and the human will struggling against fatal
and ill-comprehended laws, a victim also of unforeseeable change.
Tess of the d'Urbervilles, for example, ends with:
In particular, Hardy's novel
Jude the Obscure is full of
the sense of crisis of the later Victorian period (as witnessed in
Matthew Arnold's '
Dover Beach'). It describes the tragedy of two
new social types, Jude Fawley, a working man who attempts to
educate himself, and his lover and cousin, Sue Bridehead, who
represents the 'new woman' of the 1890s.
His mastery, as both an author and poet, lies in the creation of
natural surroundings making discoveries through close observation
and acute sensitiveness. He notices the smallest and most delicate
details, yet he can also paint vast landscapes of his own Wessex in
melancholy or noble moods. (His eye for poignant detail — such as
the spreading bloodstain on the ceiling at the end of
Tess of the d'Urbervilles and
little Jude's suicide note — often
came from clippings from newspaper reports of real events).
Poetry
- For the full text of several poems, see the External links section
In 1898 Hardy published his first volume of poetry,
Wessex Poems, a collection of poems
written over 30 years. Hardy claimed poetry as his first love, and
published collections until his death in 1928.
Although not as well
received by his contemporaries as his novels, Hardy's poetry has
been applauded considerably in recent years, in part because of the
influence on Philip
Larkin
who included many of Hardy's poems in the edition
of the Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse that Larkin
edited in 1973.
In a recent biography on Hardy,
Claire
Tomalin argues that Hardy became a truly great English poet
after the death of his wife, beginning with the elegies he wrote in
her memory, calling these poems, "one of the finest and strangest
celebrations of the dead in English poetry."
Most of his poems deal with themes of disappointment in love and
life, and mankind's long struggle against indifference to human
suffering. Some, like "The Darkling Thrush" and "An August
Midnight", appear as poems about writing poetry, because the nature
mentioned in them gives Hardy the inspiration to write those. A
vein of regret tinges his often seemingly banal themes.
His
compositions range in style from the three-volume epic closet drama The
Dynasts to smaller, and often hopeful or even cheerful
ballads of the moment such as the little-known "The Children and
Sir Nameless", a comic poem inspired by the tombs of the Martyns,
builders of Athelhampton
. A particularly strong theme in the
Wessex Poems is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars
cast over the nineteenth century, for example, in "The Sergeant's
Song" and "Leipzig", and the way those memories wind through the
English landscape and its inhabitants.
A few of Hardy's poems, such as "
The
Blinded Bird" (a melancholy polemic against the sport of ),
display his love of the natural world and his firm stance against
animal cruelty, exhibited in his
antivivisectionist views and his
membership in the
RSPCA.
Composers who have set Hardy's text to music include
Gerald Finzi, who produced six song-cycles for
poems by Hardy,
Benjamin Britten,
who based his song-cycle
Winter Words on Hardy's
poetry,
Ralph Vaughan
Williams and
Gustav Holst. Holst
also based one of his last orchestral works,
Egdon Heath, on Hardy's work. Composer
Lee Hoiby's setting of "The Darkling
Thrush" became the basis of the
multimedia opera
Darkling and Timothy
Takach, a graduate of St. Olaf, has also put "The Darkling Thrush"
into arrangement for a four-part mixed choir.
Works
Prose
Hardy divided his novels and collected short stories into three
classes:
Novels of Character and Environment
Romances and Fantasies
Novels of Ingenuity
Hardy also produced a number of minor tales and a collaborative
novel,
The Spectre of the Real (1894). An additional
short-story collection, beyond the ones mentioned above, is
A
Changed Man and Other Tales (1913). His works have been
collected as the 24-volume Wessex Edition (1912–1913) and the
37-volume Mellstock Edition (1919–1920). His largely self-written
biography appears under his second wife's name in two volumes from
1928–1930, as
The Early Life of Thomas Hardy, 1840–1891
and
The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 1892–1928, now
published in a critical one-volume edition as
The Life and Work
of Thomas Hardy, edited by Michael Millgate (1984).
Short stories (with date of first
publication)
- "How I Built Myself A House" (1865)
- "Destiny and a Blue Cloak" (1874)
- "The Thieves Who Couldn't Stop Sneezing" (1877)
- "The Duchess of Hamptonshire" (1878)
- "The Distracted Preacher" (1879)
- "Fellow-Townsmen" (1880)
- "The Honourable Laura" (1881)
- "What The Shepherd Saw" (1881)
- "A Tradition of Eighteen Hundred and Four" (1882)
- "The Three Strangers" (1883)
- "The Romantic Adventures Of A Milkmaid" (1883)
- "Interlopers At The Knap" (1884)
- "A Mere Interlude" (1885) (republished in Penguin Great Loves series)
- "A Tryst At An Ancient Earthwork" (1885)
- "Alicia's Diary" (1887)
- "The Waiting Supper" (1887-88)
- "The Withered Arm" (1888)
- "A Tragedy Of Two Ambitions" (1888)
- "The First Countess of Wessex" (1889)
- "Anna, Lady Baxby" (1890)
- "The Lady Icenway" (1890)
- "Lady Mottisfont" (1890)
- "The Lady Penelope" (1890)
- "The Marchioness of Stonehenge" (1890)
- "Squire Petrick's Lady" (1890)
- "Barbara Of The House Of Grebe" (1890)
- "The Melancholy Hussar of The German Legion" (1890)
- "Absent-Mindedness in a Parish Choir" (1891)
- "The Winters And The Palmleys" (1891)
- "For Conscience' Sake" (1891)
- "Incident in Mr. Crookhill's Life"(1891)
- "The Doctor's Legend" (1891)
- "Andrey Satchel and the Parson and Clerk" (1891)
- "The History of the Hardcomes" (1891)
- "Netty Sargent's Copyhold" (1891)
- "On The Western Circuit" (1891)
- "A Few Crusted Characters: Introduction" (1891)
- "The Superstitious Man's Story" (1891)
- "Tony Kytes, the Arch-Deceiver" (1891)
- "To Please His Wife" (1891)
- "The Son's Veto" (1891)
- "Old Andrey's Experience as a Musician" (1891)
- "Our Exploits At West Poley" (1892-93)
- "Master John Horseleigh, Knight" (1893)
- "The Fiddler of the Reels"
(1893)
- "An Imaginative Woman" (1894)
- "The Spectre of the Real" (1894)
- "A Committee-Man of 'The Terror'" (1896)
- "The Duke's Reappearance" (1896)
- "The Grave By The Handpost" (1897)
- "A Changed Man" (1900)
- "Enter a Dragoon" (1900)
- "Blue Jimmy: The Horse Stealer" (1911)
- "Old Mrs. Chundle" (1929)
- "The Unconquerable"(1992)
Poetry
(not a comprehensive list)
Drama
- The Dynasts (verse drama)
- The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of
Cornwall at Tintagel
in Lyonnesse (1923) (one-act play)
Locations in novels
Berkshire is
North
Wessex,
Devon
is Lower
Wessex,Dorset
is South
Wessex,Somerset
is Outer or Nether
Wessex,Wiltshire
is Mid-Wessex,
Bere Regis
is King's-Bere of
Tess,Bincombe
Down
cross roads is the scene of the military execution
in A Melancholy Hussar. It is a true story, the
deserters from the German Legion were shot in 1801 and are recorded
in the parish register.
Bindon Abbey
is where Clare carried her.Bournemouth
is Sandbourne of Hand of
Ethelberta and Tess
of the d'Urbervilles,Bridport
is Port Bredy,Charborough
House
and its folly tower at is the
model for Welland House in the novel Two on a Tower.Corfe Castle is the
Corvsgate-Castle
of
Hand of Ethelberta.
Cranborne Chase
is The Chase scene of Tess's
seduction. (Note — Bowerchalke
on Cranborne Chase at was the film location for the
great fire in John Schlesinger's
1967 film Far
from the Madding Crowd.)Milborne St Andrew
is "Millpond St Judes" in Far From the Madding
Crowd. Weatherby Castle is
the location for the "Tower" in "Two on a Tower" with
Little England Cottage, Milborne St
Andrew being the location of Swithin St Cleeves home and remains as
described to this day
Dorchester, Dorset
is Casterbridge, the scene of Mayor of
Casterbridge.Dunster Castle
in Somerset
is Castle De Stancy of A
Laodicean.Fordington moor
is Durnover moor and
fields.Greenhill
Fair
near Bere
Regis
is Woodbury Hill Fair,Lulworth Cove
is Lulstead Cove,Marnhull
is Marlott of Tess of the
D'Urbervilles,Melbury
House
near Evershot
is Great Hintock Court in A Group of
Noble Dames.Minterne
is Little Hintock,Owermoigne
is Nether Moynton in Wessex
Tales.
Piddlehinton
and Piddle
Trenthide
are the
Longpuddle of A Few Crusted
Characters.Puddletown
Heath, Moreton
Heath, Tincleton
Heath and Bere
Heath are
Egdon Heath.Poole
is
Havenpool in Life's Little
Ironies.Portland
is the scene of The Pursuit of the
Well-Beloved.Puddletown
is Weatherbury in Far from the Madding
Crowd,River Frome
valley is the scene of
Talbothays dairy in
Tess.
Salisbury
is Melchester in On the Western
Circuit, Life's Little Ironies and Jude the
Obscure etc.Shaftesbury
is Shaston in Tess of the d'Urbervilles and
Jude the
Obscure.Sherborne
is Sherton-Abbas,Sherborne
Castle
is home of Lady Baxby in A Group of
Noble Dames.Stonehenge
is the scene of Tess's
apprehension.Sutton Poyntz
is Overcombe.Swanage
is the Knollsea of Hand of
Ethelberta.Taunton
is known as Toneborough in both Hardy's novels and
poems.Wantage
is Alfredston, of Jude the Obscure.
Fawley,
Berkshire
is Marygreen of Jude the Obscure.Weyhill
is Weydon Priors,Weymouth
is Budmouth Regis, the scene of
Trumpet Major & portions of other
novels;Winchester
is Wintoncester where Tess was
executed. Wimborne
is Warborne of Two on a Tower.Wolfeton House
, near Dorchester is the scene of The Lady
Penelope in a Group of Noble
Dames.Woolbridge
old Manor House, close to Wool station, is the
scene of Tess's confession and honeymoon.
In other literature
Hardy provides the
springboard for
D. H.
Lawrence's
Study of Thomas
Hardy (1936). Though this work became a platform for
Lawrence's own developing philosophy rather than a more standard
literary study, the influence of Hardy's treatment of character and
Lawrence's own response to the central
metaphysic behind many of Hardy's novels helped
significantly in the development of
The
Rainbow (1915, suppressed) and
Women in Love (1920, private
publication). Hardy was clearly the starting point for the
character of the novelist Edward Driffield in
W Somerset Maugham's novel
Cakes and Ale. Thomas Hardy's works
feature prominently in the narrative in
Christopher Durang's
The Marriage of Bette and
Boo, in which a graduate thesis analysing
Tess of the d'Urbervilles is
interspersed with analysis of Matt's family's neuroses.
Notes
- Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy: the Time-torn Man(Penguin, 2007)
pp.30,36.
- Gibson, James (ed.) (1975) Chosen Poems of Thomas Hardy,
London: Macmillan Education; p.9.
- Hardy, Emma (1961) Some Recollections by Emma Hardy; with some
relevant poems by Thomas Hardy; ed. by Evelyn Hardy & R.
Gittings. London: Oxford University Press
- "Thomas Hardy — the Time-Torn Man" (a reading of Claire Tomalin's book
of the same name), BBC Radio 4, 23 October 2006
- "Thomas Hardy at Stourhead" BBC.co.uk, 10 March 2004
(Retrieved: 7 September 2009)
- "Homeground: Dead man talking"
BBC.co.uk, 20 August 2003 (Retrieved: 7
September 2009)
- Claire Tomalin, Thomas Hardy, The Time Torn Man(Penguin, 2007),
pp.46–47.
- "Biography: Thomas Hardy"
wps.Ablongman.com, (Retrieved: 7 September 2009)
- Adelene Buckland: Thomas Hardy, Provincial
Geology and the Material Imagination
- "Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy —
Introduction" (Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism. Ed. Linda
Pavlovski. Vol. 153. Gale Group, Inc., 2005. eNotes.com. 2006. 12
March 2008) eNotes.com (Retrieved: 7 September 2009)
- Words Words Words, La Spiga Languages, 2003 p.482
- A Short History of English Literature, Emile Legouis, Oxford
Clarendon Press, 1934
- Tomalin, Claire. "Thomas Hardy." New York: Penguin, 2007.
- (Google Books)
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Leopardi, and Hardy: A Dialogic Analysis", in "Thomas Hardy
Journal", 14, 2 (Mayy 1998) pp. 35-44
- Millgate, Michael (ed.). The Life and Work of Thomas Hardy
by Thomas Hardy. London: Macmillan, 1984.
- Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography. New
York: Random House, 1982.
- Millgate, Michael. Thomas Hardy: A Biography
Revisited. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2004.
- O'Sullivan, Timothy. Thomas Hardy: An Illustrated
Biography. London: Macmillan, 1975.
- Orel, Harold. The Final Years of Thomas Hardy,
1912–1928. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,
1976.
- Orel, Harold. The Unknown Thomas Hardy. New York: St.
Martin's, 1987.
- Phelps, Kenneth. The Wormwood Cup: Thomas Hardy in
Cornwall. Padstow: Lodenek Press, 1975.
- Pinion, F. B. Thomas Hardy: His Life and Friends.
London: Palgrave, 1992.
- Pite, Ralph. Thomas Hardy: The Guarded Life. London:
Picador, 2006.
- Seymour-Smith, Martin. Hardy. London: Bloomsbury,
1994.
- Stevens-Cox, J. Thomas Hardy: Materials for a Study of his
Life, Times, and Works. St. Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan
Press, 1968.
- Stevens-Cox, J. Thomas Hardy: More Materials for a Study of
his Life, Times, and Works. St. Peter Port, Guernsey: Toucan
Press, 1971.
- Stewart, J. I. M. Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography.
New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1971.
- Turner, Paul. The Life of Thomas Hardy: A Critical
Biography. Oxford: Blackwell, 1998.
- Weber, Carl J. Hardy of Wessex, his Life and Literary
Career. New York: Columbia University Press,
1940.
- Wilson, Keith. Thomas Hardy on Stage. London:
Macmillan, 1995.
- Wilson, Keith, ed. Thomas Hardy Reappraised: Essays in
Honour of Michael Millgate. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
2006.
- Wotton, George. Thomas Hardy: Towards A Materialist Criticism.
Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 1985.
- Letter from Hardy to Bertram Windle, transcribed by
Birgit Plietzsch, from CL, vol 2, pp.131-133
External links
- Works by Thomas Hardy at Internet
Archive

- Works by Thomas Hardy in audio format from
LibriVox
- Poems by Thomas Hardy at Poetry Foundation
- Poems by Thomas Hardy at PoemHunter.com
- Thomas Hardy's Wessex Research site, including
maps, by Dr Birgit Plietzsch
- The
Thomas Hardy Society
- The Thomas Hardy Association
- Works by Thomas Hardy in e-book version
- Thomas Hardy's ashes at Westminster Abbey
- Pictures of Thomas Hardy visiting Marie Stopes at her
lighthouse home on Portland, Dorset
- Letter from Hardy to Bertram Windle, transcribed by
Birgit Plietzsch, from CL, vol 2, pp.131-133
- The Life and Death of Thomas Hardy @ Ward's Book of
Days
- Free to read on a cell phone — Hardy
works.
- Hardy Collection at the Harry Ransom Center
at the University of Texas at Austin
- "Emma Lavinia Hardy, 1840–1912": a
controversial retrospective analysis suggesting that Hardy's wife
contracted syphilis and the subsequent debate, from TLS, 29 August
2007.
- Tess of the d'Urbervilles and other works in
HTML format.